


Of All the Constellations

by yourguardianangel



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alien Planet, Canon Compliant, Dream Bonds, Dream Sequences, Dreams, F/M, Fix-It, Force Bond (Star Wars), Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Millenium Falcon, Planet Hopping, Planets, Post TROS, Post canon fix-it, Post-Canon, Resurrection, Rey has a midlife crisis, Reylo - Freeform, Scavenger Ben Solo, Scavenger Rey (Star Wars), Selfcare, Soul Bond, TRoS Spoilers, Tatooine (Star Wars), There will be sex, abuse of wookieepedia, dream! Ben Solo, dream!Ben, eventually, fixit, hermit!Rey, so much research
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2020-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-09 16:08:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 27,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21915958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourguardianangel/pseuds/yourguardianangel
Summary: Post TROS....She didn’t notice the figure in black until she stepped onto the shore.He was sitting cross legged at the far end of the island, facing away from her. Dark hair fell to his shoulders, blending with the cloak that was spread out in a semicircle behind him. As the cloak continued down his back, the black faded to grey, and where the hem of it sat against the sand it was perfectly white.Wary as she was, Rey couldn’t help the feeling that she knew this figure.“Ben?” Rey called....Rey retreats to Tattoine to seek solitude and attempt to heal. However, she soon discovers that her nights are plagued with a strange, recurrent dream, and certain truths begin to reveal themselves. Will Rey be able to overcome her own grief?Are some losses not quite what they seem?Can a dyad exist without its other half?..Post-TROS, multi-chapter fix-it.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 71
Kudos: 188





	1. Shadows Settle on the Place that you Left

It was over.

Rey could barely remember a single detail of the flight back to the rebel base. She didn’t remember pulling her own weak and battered body out of the cockpit of her ship, nor did she remember almost falling off the wing as her knees went out from under her. She didn’t remember shooting her hand out to brace herself against the metal of the x-wing (two broken knuckles, one large laceration across the palm) but she did, and she huffed out a pained groan as her ankles jarred on the jungle floor. She didn’t register the multitude of wounds that were scattered across her body like embroiderer’s thread, each of them a testament to her own ordeal.

It was all little more than a series of confused blinks; one moment there were darkened shapes in an ancient, evil temple, a familiar point of light next to her in the black, the next Rey had found herself alone and staring, empty and bloodied, at the joyous faces of the rebels. She was pulled into crushing hugs by anyone who cared to notice her in the chaos of the victory, and she found her own arms mechanically wrapping around each stranger in turn. It was probably a good thing, really, since a quiet echo in the back of her head didn’t seem to trust her legs with standing for very long. It was only when Finn and Poe finally caught sight of her, and she felt the cradle of their bodies close around her, an overwhelming mess of arms and sounds and the scent of them both filling her lungs that she knew, that meant safety, that meant _home_. Only then did Rey’s legs finally give out on her and a hoarse note of grief escape her throat. It was there, held in their arms, that the magnitude of what had happened finally reached her. In that moment, all the pain of her body faded to nothing, for it was nothing in comparison to the pain coming from within. There, deep inside her, Rey could feel the raw and bloodied edges of something ripped away, a half of something that she hadn’t even realized she possessed, suddenly gone.

Forever.

Finn and Poe were alarmed, but ultimately unsurprised when she went limp in their arms. She had saved the galaxy, after all. But amidst all of the bloodshed and the sacrifice of their own people, they would never be able to truly understand the cost.

…

It took two days for Rey to regain consciousness for longer than a minute at a time. She had been able to stay suspended, peacefully, in a blanket of utter darkness. It was nice, she found with some surprise. It was nothing like the darkness she had seen in Snoke, or even in Palpatine. She was weightless, completely surrounded by it, but she didn’t feel trapped by it. It was more a kind of comforting embrace, like the feeling of hiding beneath one’s bedsheets to keep the shadows at bay. She knew she couldn’t stay there forever, but she hoped, in the hazy way that one does in dreams, that when she returned to the light of day some of the pain would have disappeared.

She was right of course. By the time she came to, many of her bodily wounds had scabbed over, and she found herself bruised on more parts of her body that she knew to be possible. Lying still, the physical pain was almost manageable.

She had found herself staring at the roof of a shallow, moss-covered cave for several minutes, eyes lazily focusing in and out, before realizing that she was even awake. Sunlight streamed through the soft forms of stalactites, golden with late afternoon sun and shifting in the gentle movement of the trees outside. Motes of dust, or perhaps pollen, hung heavy in the air, catching light in brief points of gold. She slowly mustered up the courage to turn her head. The sharp stab of pain that crawled from her shoulder to her scalp was enough to make her wince, but she was rewarded with the sight of Finn, napping quietly on a supply crate. She suspected he had placed there for this sole purpose, arms crossed and head dipped to his chest with a pensive frown. Behind him was a perfect window of jungle greenery, and she slowly placed her location in the rebel camp as one of the many caves that littered the edges of the rebel base. The soft noises of medical equipment surrounded her, and she wondered whether there were others who needed it more than her.

Rey felt the drag of sandpaper all through her throat as she tried to speak Finn’s name. She let out a harsh cough, which jarred what had to be at _least_ a couple of broken ribs, and Finn jumped. He was alert in an instant, with the force of only a man who had seen the results of war. His eyes turned outward, towards any kind of attack from behind, then swept immediately across to Rey. She must have been a sight, but his face lit up with such relief that she could practically feel it warming her from the inside. It made her eyes prickle, but there were no tears left to cry. He had always been so beautifully, completely open and giving with his expressions, so very unguarded. She wondered, briefly, whether he had never had a reason to hide his emotions on his face; how early in life the First Order made their inductees shroud themselves in the stormtrooper masks.

“You’re awake,” he murmured, eyes widening. Concern flashed across his features and he threw a command over his shoulder, “I need a medic! She’s awake!”

She tried to move her hands to her sides and pull herself up, but the coarse fabric of the blankets shifting across her skin made her gasp in pain. Finn was by her side at once.

“Hey, hey, don’t do that,” he said, his hands gently brushing her hair out of her face. She wanted to protest as he pulled her up into a careful seated position, wincing as her stiff muscles shifted. He was murmuring all the while. “It’s okay, everything’s ok. Are you okay?”

Rey tried again to speak; her throat burned and she let out a weak croak.

“I’ll get you some water,” he said, patting her gently on the arm and struggling to break her gaze. “I’ll be right back.”

_Please don’t leave me here,_ she begged silently, but the medic arrived at that moment and began fussing over her immediately in all the ways she didn’t want. He disappeared, and she could no longer ignore the blinding pain that coursed through her body. The doctor was asking her questions that she couldn’t answer, but she nodded and shook her head as best she could. She couldn’t tell the medic that the wounds on her body, horrific as they were, held nothing to the chasm that had been created in the very core of her being. She was terrified to even try and feel it out, to get a sense of the edges of it; she didn’t want to know what was missing yet. She didn’t want to know how much of herself hadn’t been hers to keep in the first place.

Finn was back before the medic was finished, a pouch of water in shaking hands, and he clumsily attempted to pour it into her mouth. She took it from him easily enough, raising her hand over his and tugging it from his grasp with a thankful glance, and this act in itself seemed to be reassuring to Finn.

With every moment that passed, her physical injuries felt more manageable, and by reaching out a little, Rey could feel the Force gently working away at her as certainly as the medic herself did.

The moment the water touched her tongue was the first time she had felt alive in days. She gulped, unable to help herself, mouthful after mouthful until she needed to gasp for air. Even that felt good, in spite of the sharp twinge of her ribs.

“Better?” Finn asked, an eyebrow cocked and a smile of amusement barely hiding the very genuine look of concern he was still giving her. She nodded gingerly.

“Better,” she tried, her voice small and brittle to her own ears.

They sat in silence for a moment or two; the call of alien birdlife and shifting treetops drifting above the muted sounds of people bustling about their work outside. Rey let herself lay back against the small, makeshift hospital bed. Finn had sat down next to her once again, his elbows leaning on his knees in an attempt to both be close to her and to place their faces on the same plane of level. Rey realized that he was doing this so that she didn’t have to move herself too much to see him, and it made the corner of her mouth quirk up. She looked him over slowly; it had only been a few days, but Finn seemed to have lost a _lot_ of weight, and the skin underneath his eyes looked bruised and yellow. She could feel the questions burning in him, radiating from his skin in waves, and he opened his mouth.

“Do you want to-“

“No,” she said at once, and he nodded, needing no further elaboration.

“Not yet, anyway,” she amended, softly. “ But I will. I promise.”

They both relaxed, and Finn took turns between quietly watching her, tenderness etched across his features, and discussing any menial thing that he could think of. Anything to fill the air with positivity. She listened, smiling silently at him as the sunlight gradually faded. When she drifted back to sleep it was not to the darkness, but to peaceful dreams.

…

Finn would have liked Rey to take it a little slower.

Finn would have liked a great many things, of course. For instance, he would have liked Poe to take a break and get some rest; the man hadn’t slept more than a handful of hours since the final battle, and that had been over a week ago. No, he was too busy leading as many political runs around the galaxy as possible. The premise was relatively simple, and had proven effective in destabilising the many planets that still contained First Order holdouts. On each run, they would arrive in the upper atmosphere of the target planet or system and broadcast the news of the First Order and Palpatine’s fall across all terrestrial channels, encouraging the people to rise up and as many stormtroopers to defect as possible. Those that resisted or attempted to flee were picked off easily enough, but many more actually agreed to the terms of surrender. The act of confirming the origin and identity of each stormtrooper was easy enough. Though the First Order had many flaws, its recordkeeping was not one of them; Finn had been doing his best to help decode the many layers of redacted material, and had been largely successful. The final breach of the First Order archives had been torrential; thousands upon thousands of identities, thousands upon thousands of lost children, all at his fingertips and ready to be reunited with their families. Thus far he had overcome his own aching curiosity and avoided spending time trying to find his own records, but the time would come soon enough.

Mobilising enough starships to perform any significant level of repatriation for those who had been forced into the service of the First Order proved more difficult, however, and it was too soon after the fallout for overtures of a new republic to be anything more than that; the opening strains of a song. No one was about to step forth and take responsibility for overseeing peace, so it was simply up to Poe and himself. When he wasn’t in the cockpit of a fighter, Poe could be found wandering through the camp’s many makeshift medical facilities, thanking those that had been injured and paying respects to the dying. There was no time for rest, let alone for them to even really talk to each other outside of the many political meetings they found themselves in, plotting the next course of action and tracking the progress of peace across the galaxy.

So Finn was less than pleased to have to debrief Rey less than 48 hours after she had emerged from her coma. Poe only had a four-hour gap before the next outpost raid was set for departure, and he and Finn were both expected to lend their voices to a high-powered, galaxy-wide freedom speech in that time as well. She managed to walk unaided most of the way to the small private rooms General Leia used to use, and only had to stop briefly to lean on her staff. No one around her seemed to notice, however, and when she finally found the two generals sitting at a small table within, she propped herself up in a chair opposite them. She sat stiffly, her good hand and her bandaged hand both folded in her lap, trying not to move too much lest she disturb any of the more painful of bruises. She allowed her eyes to grow glassy as her mouth mechanically provided the answers they wanted, devoid of emotion, disconnected from the rest of her.

Of course they needed to hear about her own experience of the battle, about what had happened to Kylo- to Ben Solo, about the death of Palpatine and its confirmation. Rey provided them with the most direct answers that she could; she owed them that, as both her friends and her companions.

Palpatine was ended before her own eyes, rendered into screaming dust and a lifetime of bad dreams.

Ben Solo had saved her life, and was dead because of it.

Darkness had been forced to retreat, and the First and the Final Order had fallen from the very skies.

They had won.

It was easier to put it in simple terms for them. They needn’t know the details of it all, didn’t need to know about the dyad or all that it entailed between herself and Ben. They didn’t need to know about the way she could feel her soul shudder inside her, reaching for something that was gone. Everyone was so tired, so beyond relieved that they had done it, they had won, that it didn’t matter whether there were some gaps. Poe was easier to convince than Finn, however. Finn watched her intently across the table, eyes boring into her face as she presented the bland, toneless version of her experience. He knew there was more to it, something beyond the words and the trauma she was sharing with them, but Rey was relying on Finn’s loyal nature not to press her about it, or at the very least not to do so right there. When they were satisfied, they each pulled her into a gentle hug, and though Finn looked ready to catch her for another conversation, he was briefly distracted by one of the techs that had been helping him with the First Order records. By the time he had extricated himself again, Rey had disappeared.

…

Finn was drawn from his cot far earlier than he would have liked. He had barely laid his head to rest five hours earlier when his eyes opened, fully alert to something he didn’t immediately have a reason for. He blinked in confusion and rolled to his feet, running a hand across the back of his head. Stepping out of the open-air sleeping quarters, he realised it was barely dawn, and the forest was filled with silence and the milky-blue light of early sun. His eyes tracked to a small patch of movement, and he realised why he was awake. Annoyance rose within him as he spotted Rey up and moving through the camp. He was even less pleased to realise she was standing in front of Luke’s old and battered x-wing fighter, now effectively hers, staring up through the front windscreen with a contemplative expression on her face. He didn’t have to know what she was planning to sense the danger of her thoughts; the hole in the pit of his stomach let him know that well enough. He picked his way towards her through the many supply crates and low-roofed tents, urgency keeping him light footed. He approached from behind, unable to see her face. He was close enough to see the white knuckles on her right hand where they were gripping her staff, leaning into its stability when he spoke.

“What are you doing?” he asked her. She didn’t turn around, didn’t even acknowledge him.

“Rey.”

She started, and turned her head just far enough to see him in the periphery of her eye. That movement, so small yet sharp and certain, reminded him suddenly of the power she had grown over just the brief time he had known her. It was still there, he realised, no matter how fragile or small she may seem at that moment. But it couldn’t stop her hurting as it did now. Nothing could.

“I just…” she tried, but her voice was distant, distracted.

He stepped up until he was by her side, her bandaged hand held close to her frame. Her eyes had come back to the x-wing again, locked in place, searching. Longing. It was only then that he spotted the small duffel bag, propped up against the landing gear. When she finally looked at him, he could see the emotions brimming over, jumping rapidly across her features as she tried to find words to explain. She didn’t need to, he realised. He could already understand.

“I know,” he said. Her eyes welled up in gratitude.

“Help me?” She asked, her voice barely above a whisper, and he nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

She barely weighed a thing, and it took no effort at all to give her a boost into the craft.

“Are you sure about this?” Finn asked her. He didn’t even need to; she nodded nonetheless. A million things burbled up in the back of his throat to say to her.

_Stay._

_I love you._

_You’re the only family I have._

_Poe is going to be so pissed._

_Please. _

“I’ll cover for you,” was all he could manage, but something in her eyes let him know that she understood him too.

“Thank you,” she mouthed, and in one smooth motion she used her good arm to slide the roof latch closed and prepared for take off. By the time she hit the atmosphere and jumped to light speed, most of the rebel camp was watching her departure in silence.


	2. Our Minds are Troubled By the Emptiness

Deserts, though they may have their quirks, are more or less the same no matter what po-dunk planet you strand yourself on.

Rey had discovered this quickly enough after touching down just outside of the old Skywalker homestead. The hot, dry air slapped her in the face as she disembarked, the conditioned atmosphere of the x-wing dissipating seconds after she had released the seal. She squinted, admiring the flat, uniform landscape, the horizon obscured by the haze of the heat so that the land and the sky blended into one another. Rey swayed, and had to steady herself for a moment; in that strange, seering heat, she had almost seen the outline of a ruined star destroyer, just like the ones that had littered her scavenging grounds on Jakku.

_ Some things change for the better, _ she reminded herself, but decided it would be best if she went inside and sat in the shade for a little while.

The buildings were almost exactly as Luke had described them; squat, round, igloo-like shapes nestled on the surface of that harsh landscape, hiding a larger complex of semi-underground rooms. The steps down were covered in a thick layer of sand that had stacked itself high in each of the corners like a snowdrift. The access panel on the door had long since been pulled off and the door was unlocked, so she took a deep breath, shouldered her duffel bag, and stepped inside.

It was clear that the sand people had raided this place long ago, picking apart and taking anything that wasn’t literally built into the walls. The central courtyard was noticeably cooler than being outside on the plateau, and Rey sighed with relief. She hadn’t realized how much she preferred planets with a more temperate climate, regardless of how familiar the heat of Tatooine may seem.

_But familiarity will have to do for now, _Rey thought.

She placed a hand on the rough stonewall and closed her eyes, centring herself. Her brow furrowed as she opened herself up to the memory of the walls. She could feel the fire that burned Luke’s childhood home and drove him on his journey to save the galaxy. She could feel the bloodshed of his aunt and uncle, and of someone from a much longer time ago, someone who was nonetheless connected to him by blood. Their absence left a chill on her skin, and Rey felt the hairs on her arms stand on end. Beyond that, though, she could feel the many years of comfort, stability, and safety that this place had offered to its occupants.

It had truly been a home.

Rey drew her hand back against herself, clasping her injured wrist against her. There was a small inset bench that had been hewn out of the wall in an area Rey now knew to be the kitchen, and she sat down there, dropping her bag softly on the floor. She looked around, watching as the silent, scattered memories she had conjured only moments ago continued to echo and overlay themselves with the empty space. Luke, young and smiling and naïve, bounding up the staircase two and at time and calling over his shoulder. Aunt Beru, stirring a pot, her back to Rey. Uncle Owen approaching and kissing Beru’s cheek from behind, making her jump in surprise, before his form moved away and faded. Children running past the doorway in a giggling pack, dressed in clothing that looked old to Rey’s eyes. For a moment, the entire household thrummed with people, alive and thinking and bustling through their days. They faded away again, settling back into the old bones of the homestead as easily as the eddying of sand, and Rey was alone again. When she raised her hand to her face, she was surprised to feel tears upon her cheeks.

Rey had not been completely honest with herself when it came to her expectations of survival.

At the time, she had thought that this was reasonable. After all, as the only known (and living) person in the galaxy capable of standing against a Sith, she hadn’t exactly expected to come away from that fight. She had done her best not to think about it at the time; someone very important had once said that all things good are built upon hope, so she had fought to maintain that. But after the dust had settled, and she had found the innermost foundations of herself shredded and bleeding beyond all thought of possible repair… Well.

A part of her wished that the final battle had been her last; one single shining act of good before becoming one with the force. Part of her didn’t really know what to do with herself when it hadn’t been.

Not without him, anyway.

_No. _

Rey shook herself, brushing away her tears and her train of thought. So what if she still had her whole life ahead of her. She had spent almost her entire life alone, surviving, and she would continue to do so until she either was compelled to go somewhere else, or until she simply stopped surviving.

No need to think any more about her could-have-beens, or errant pipedreams.

They could never come true now, anyway.

Best to just get on with things.

…

Rey set about preparing the place for the night. Her first and foremost concern was to ensure her own safety. She locked down the x-wing and removed any of the rare or essential components from its guts, lest there should be any raiders or fellow scavengers happening upon it, and she spent an hour fixing the door lock mechanism and programming it to recognize her hand. It gave a satisfying _beep_ when she pressed her hand to it, and the door slid open with a grating, sand-logged hiss that she imagined could be heard throughout the entire complex. There was an old woman who had come past before sunset and asked for her name, and Rey had barely the energy to stammer through that interaction. The woman herself had seemed nice enough, though Rey got the distinct impression that she was sizing her up. Something about the way her many-wrinkled eyelids narrowed to watch her, though Rey reasoned that it might have simply been due to the glare of the desert. She told Rey about the old moisture harvesters that were dotted across the Skywalker property. The woman also said that she had some parts that could get them running again, and that Rey should come past Tosche Station in the morning if she wanted them. Rey appreciated the gesture, and smiled to the woman as she rode away.

She buried Luke and Leia’s lightsabers as the suns descended towards the horizon, and as the sky bled through with a thousand reds and purples, she breathed out and reached inwards for… Something.

The first shot of pain had her gasping for air, and her eyes shot open as she staggered.

_ Not today then, I suppose,_ Rey thought to herself. She swallowed, nodding and blinking in the blazing light to fortify herself, and settled for watching the sunset alone.

…

Rey wasn’t even slightly surprised by the sudden plummet of the temperature. It was, after all, simply what deserts tended to do. Once the twin suns had set, the ground radiated heat for all of half an hour before practically frosting over, and the desert breeze suddenly carried a wintry chill that cut through the loosely woven fabric of her wrappings. She stood in the doorway, staring at the stars for as long as she could stand it. The gust that finally sent her back into the homestead was strong enough to leave her ears ringing, and she couldn’t help but giggle as she pulled the door shut and raced to find an old bantha wool shawl that Rose Tico had once leant her. She rifled through her pack quickly in the darkness. Between the many pouches she kept on her belt and the pack itself, Rey had cobbled together a collection of objects that remarkably resembled her old Jakku scavengers kit, if a bit improved. Finding the rough fabric of the shawl by touch, she quickly swept it around her shoulders and tucked it firmly into her belt before continuing her search. She heard the metallic _clink _ of the objects she was looking for and extracted an old stormtrooper-issue glowrod and a small, cobbled-together generator. It was simple to hook them together, and the glowrod hummed quietly to life in her hands. It cast a warm yellow glow across the entire kitchen area. She had stashed a few weeks worth of rations from the rebel base, as well as several more exotic perishables that she had grown to love over the past year. After taking stock of these things, she chose the rations, splashing a small amount of water over them in a chipped bowl to activate them. She rolled out her moth-eaten sleeping roll across the stone bench as she waited for the rations to finish preparing themselves. The notion of checking and setting up one of the bedrooms for her own use felt overwhelming in the darkness, and she resolved to do so in the morning.

She ate in silence; the sound of the howling wind whistling through unchecked holes and tunnels in the homestead her only company. When she laid herself down to rest, it was with a weariness that felt surprisingly… Alright.

It was only in the darkness that she truly felt alone, and the aches and pains of her body were no longer able to stifle out the truth of her soul.

“Please,” she whispered into the darkness. “Let me sleep in peace.”

Though no one replied, Rey could have sworn she felt buoyed by the whispering presence of a crowd as she sank into sleep.

…

_Blackness. Perfect blackness, all around. Rey looked up, and down, and though she could see her own body as if it were standing under a cloudy sky at midday, everything around her was a blank, featureless canvas of darkness._

_“Hello?” She called, uncertain. Her voice seemed to echo from all around her, closer and far away and closer again, moving through the void in unexplainable ways. Her eyebrows furrowed together, and she raised her hands to her face. The marks were gone, the broken fingers healed, and she realized, slowly, as if her mind were treading through an ocean of soup, that she had been able to raise her hands. In all other dreams like this, she had been simply motionless in the darkness, and it had been peaceful. Here, she felt no peace. She took a hesitant step forward, watching her feet as she did. Her foot lifted and placed itself down on something solid and chilly. Ripples of darkness moved out slowly from around her foot in eerie waves._

_Huh._

_Unsure of what else to do, Rey began to walk forward. She had not the faintest clue as to whether she was walking straight or in circles, or even for how long she walked. It was cold, and dark, but moving was her only option. She knew this deep inside._

_“Hello?”_

_Rey didn’t know whether her mind was playing tricks on her when she first spotted it. There, ahead of her, far in the distance, was a thin strip of grey amidst the black. She sped up, her feet dragging themselves into a jog, then a run. Something about it filled her with an urgency she couldn’t explain. The narrow band of grey grew wider, and closer, until she could see that it was not a figure, or a door, or even some kind of memory; it was a small island, pale sand glistening dimly from an unseen light source. She slowed when she was a few feet away from its banks, wary. The ripples from her footsteps broke gently upon the sand, and though she hadn’t been able to judge its size before, she realized that it couldn’t be any longer than the millennium falcon, and certainly not as wide._

_She didn’t notice the figure in black until she stepped onto the shore._

_He was sitting cross legged at the far end of the island, facing away from her. Dark hair fell to his shoulders, blending with the cloak that was spread out in a semicircle behind him. As the cloak continued down his back, the black faded to grey, and where the hem of it sat against the sand it was perfectly white._

_Wary as she was, Rey couldn’t help the feeling that she knew this figure._

_“Ben?” Rey called. She felt panic rising in her, a desperate, galloping feeling that seemed to travel from her throat across her collarbones in an electric arc, leaving her breaths shallow and quick. The figure did not give any physical indication that it had heard her, but she could sense its interest piqued. She took a step forward, and felt a barrier of air solid against her skin._

_“ I wouldn’t,” the figure murmured, and it echoed around her until Rey felt as though he had whispered right against her ear. Every hair on the back of her neck stood up on end._

_“It is you,” she breathed. He did not move. A confusing mixture of emotions swam through the muddy depths of her brain; fear, surprise, guilt, relief, hope, grief, all of them bleeding into each other. Rey stood in silence for what felt like an eternity in this strange, dark place, searching for the things that she needed to say, things she needed answers to._

_“Is this a dream?” she asked finally. Perhaps her mind was simply trying to give her closure, she reasoned, and that was why the dream felt so different from her previous experiences. _

_The figure broke its frozen reverie with a single twitch of his head; she wouldn’t have even caught it if it wasn’t for the slight shift in the gleaming of his hair._

_“I suppose it must be,” the figure said, a cool resignation to it. _

_She hadn’t expected the words to hurt as much as they did, to erode so efficiently the feeling that perhaps this was something a little bigger than the workings of her own mind. It all crashed down as quickly as it had arrived, and Rey felt as though she were choking on tears unshed, filling her lungs, drowning her from the inside. She would have said anything in that moment to make him talk again, just to hear his voice._

_“I never wanted this to happen. I never wanted you to – to sacrifice yourself for me.”_

_“But I did it, nonetheless.” he said. _

_His shoulders pulled inwards around him, as though to shelter himself from the cold, and a shudder seemed to pulse from the middle of the sandy island. She didn’t get a chance to say anything more._

_“It’s time for you to go now,” he said, and then the sand beneath her feet was opening up, and she was falling through the darkness._

…

Rey woke with tears streaking her sheets. Pale sunlight was pouring through shafts in the central atrium of the Skywalker homestead, casting the stone in a pale blue-grey. It was not quite morning. Rey took a deep breath to still the racing of her heart and breathed it out slowly through clenched teeth. She smiled sadly to herself. _ He’s gone, you fool,_ she chided herself. _ Stop reaching for things that aren’t there. _ But his voice continued to echo through her mind as she started to move around the kitchen, preparing herself a warm morning drink, and the strange, gritty sand of that island seemed to cling in the spaces between her toes. It was only when she was finally attempting to choose a bedroom for herself amongst the six or so (quite literal) blank slates that lined the atrium walls that she realized what was bothering her so much about the dream, why it was refusing to let her go in peace. It was the way he had spoken. There was something odd in his voice, as though every answer he had given to her had not been a positive confirmation of her own suspicions. Rather, it had rang with an uncertainty of its own.

Such thoughts were impossible, of course, but they followed her well through the day, to Tosche Station and back again, and well into the afternoon as she fixed the very first moisture harvester of many.

She prayed for sleep to come easy once more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we go! Our first bit of Ben. Hope this satisfies some of you, and please let me know if you spot any egregious spelling errors/grammatical errors/nonsensical sentences, as this is an unbeta'd chapter I smashed out in a couple of hours. In fact, the whole thing is unbeta'd, so please help a gal out if you see anything, and feel free to simply yell in the comments at me. :)


	3. Destroy the Middle, It's a Waste of Time

Rey was pleased with the overall progress she had made on the homestead. It had only been a few weeks, but her efforts had paid off. Two thirds of the moisture harvesters (which Rey had now learned from the Tosche Station locals were technically called _vaporators_) were up and running, and she had even started a modest little garden of hardy, edible plants that lived on the countertop of her kitchen courtesy of the spare water she now gathered on the daily. A short amount of hunting around had allowed her to find the vast underground water storage tanks hidden below the complex within a seemingly empty alcove; only a thorough stomping of the ground had revealed the hatch. She had begun storing her excess collected water in there, and had slowly built up a small bathtub’s worth. She wasn’t sure when she had started to think of it as _her_ kitchen, or _ her _ homestead either, but it felt comfortable to do so, so she didn’t delve too deeply into it. Her evenings were spent reading through the old Jedi texts that Luke had left for her, a small radio tuned between channels in the background so that she could only hear white noise and the occasional snatch of a phrase. There were a few select pages that she had hastily flipped past when they had appeared, pages that she knew featured the words _ dyad _ and _ balance _ and _ soul mates _ but she could not fully remember the contents of them. Whatever they had to say, they wouldn’t be any help her now, of that she was certain, and the very thought of reading them, of processing the possibility of what she had truly lost, well. It made her stomach lurch, and her whole world feel as though it had been tipped 45 degrees to the side.

So she avoided them, and continued her studies in whichever ways she found most manageable.

In the early mornings she had taken to going on runs across the property, long before the sun began to beat its inescapable heat upon the land. The steady pattern of this routine had done wonders for her physical recovery.

Her internal recovery, however, was another matter.

In short, Rey was avoiding more than just pages in an old book. Though she would not admit it, she had been studiously dodging every opportunity to use her connection with the force for anything beyond the most nominal of tasks; sensing a person’s presence, reading residual feelings from the surfaces of objects, remotely checking that the front door had locked itself (it always had). Beyond that, she hadn’t so much as lifted a pebble that was out of her reach. Hell, she hadn’t even tried to manipulate the dimwitted merchant in Mos Eisley, who had been trying to sell her contraband seedlings at quite frankly extortionate prices. It wasn’t like she had needed a bargain, she reasoned somewhat sourly as credits were transferred out of her account and into this grubby looking nerf herder’s back pocket. She had a vague suspicion that someone had been topping up her account from afar. Finn, most likely, though she wouldn’t put it past any number of recent friends she had made in the resistance. She had resolved, however, to use as little of that money as possible, and not just because she thought they may try to track her location through her transactions. No, the resistance needed every resource it could get its hands on. Even if Palpatine was gone and the First Order was crippled, flushing the last of them out would be a task that could potentially span decades, with splinter factions and uprisings a constant threat to the newfound status quo.

Just thinking about it made Rey’s head hurt, and she would go out in the midday sun to work on the guts of some rusted hardware just to distract herself from it.

She didn’t want to admit that she was scared of what Finn and Poe would say if they were to visit her here. Here, in this strange place of desolation and peace, of memories and of a family that wasn’t quite hers, and yet somehow, in some way, undeniably _was_.

She certainly didn’t want to know what they would think about her dreams, either.

They had continued, of course. Every night was the same. She would find herself in that dark, silent place, and navigate across the shimmering, wet floor to the little island of grey sand. There, she would try to talk to Ben through the sluggish mud of her own brain, and he would sometimes even talk back. It was nice, even if she had to wake up every morning to the devastating revelation that it was all a figment of her own mind. After the first week of those encounters, she had been able to move past Ben’s force barrier, or perhaps he simply stopped putting it up. She had respected his space nonetheless, and it had taken days of careful inching forward before she was within arm’s reach of him. Once or twice, she had arrived on the island to find him standing, his hands clasped behind his back and staring vacantly out into the dark. Watching. Rey didn’t know what he was watching for, and he hadn’t answered when she asked. He had slowly begun to turn around towards her, too, though he never quite looked her in the eye.

It was nice, being there with him, wherever they happened to be.

She would tell him about her day and he would listen, silent and intent. He seemed most comfortable when she propped herself upon the sand, nearby to him but not touching. Never touching. Rey was scared that reaching out for him would make him disappear like a swirl of ink inside a bottle, and she simply couldn’t have that happen.

Even if he wasn’t really there.

So she passed the time by talking, hard as it was, and occasionally he would share things in return. Small things, things that when she awoke she would swear she had already known about before.

She told him about her childhood in the wastes of Jakku, and about teaching herself to pilot imperial and rebel ships using old simulators she had jerry-rigged to run inside the depths of the old ruined star destroyers. She told him about how she had built her first speeder out of rubbish, how she had spent several months searching out the right pieces for it, agonizing and going without meals to cover the hours searching for pieces she had no intention of selling, only for a group of thugs to pull it apart while she was selling scavenged pieces to the Unkar Plutt, the resident junk boss. This dream-Ben didn’t express emotion often, but she could see the anger that rose within him at the injustice of that particular story.

_“It’s alright,” she had told him, “it was a long time ago.”_

_“You didn’t deserve to be treated that way,” he had gritted out, and she was surprised by the ferocity with which he said it. His eyes almost – ALMOST- met her face-on, flashing bright against his pale skin. Her mouth curved up in a sad smile at the sight of it._

_“I’ve dealt with worse things than a few half-wit criminals, Ben,” she told him, her voice soft and gentle. His eyes suddenly darkened, and he turned away from her completely, closing in on himself once again._

_“Of course you have,” he murmured. “And by my hand, no less.”_

_“It wasn’t you,” Rey insisted, and oh, how she wanted to reach out and place a hand against his forearm, get him to turn around and face her. “Snoke- and Palpatine- they were always eating away at you inside of your head-“_

_“Not always,” he insisted. “Not when it mattered.”_

_Rey sat silent for a moment, processing this admission. She supposed she had known that, deep down; that was why her mind was dredging it up now, feeding it through the mouth of this conjuration. It wanted her to resolve something about it, clearly._

_“I… I forgive you for it, you know,” she said slowly. He shifted a little, raising his head._

_“Perhaps you do,” he replied. “But I don’t think I can forgive myself.”_

_“Ben…” Rey had said, but it was too late, and she was falling again, the slipping of her bare feet against the sand and the dropping of her stomach now a familiar sensation. _

She had avoided discussions of forgiveness for a while after that.

…

A side effect of the dreams was that Rey didn’t really mind the long, sweat-stained days all alone so much. She certainly wouldn’t have minded a little bit of help on occasion, especially when it came to moving any one of the many heavy and unwieldy objects she had found lying about on the property without the force. She could sense it waiting there patiently for her, but she simply didn’t want to risk it, couldn’t let it in again. Not after what had happened. Not with her edges so raw and unstable. She was worried that if she pulled on that thread inside her while it was still healing, something important may become completely unraveled. That, whether intentional or not, she would be left without that last final connection to the great big _everything_ around her, the connection that had put her on the path of the greatest journey of her life, and in the way of so many remarkable people.

She would wait, for better or for worse.

…

She noticed the change right around the two month mark of her stay in the homestead. Sure, perhaps the Ben she saw in her dreams seemed to be growing quieter and quieter as the days drew on, and showed less and less interest in the things she was saying, but perhaps that was simply a sign that she was healing, that she was moving on. Perhaps it was simply a normal part of the trauma process.

_On that particular night she had slipped into the dream world of void and darkness easily enough, only to find the island already in sight. Though puzzling, this wouldn’t have bothered her initially, if it weren’t for the dark, slumped figure on the beach. Rey had lurched forwards in a slow, staggering run towards the shoreline. The floor felt tacky against her feet, sucking at them and slowing her down a little, but she made it to the beach with only a minor stumble along the way. She had every intention of placing a hand on the figure’s shoulder and shaking him awake, to hell with their strange unspoken rules, so acute was her worry. But from the very moment her feet touched the sand, the figure began to stir. He was propping himself up on one elbow, a hand feeding through his hair and an expression of confusion on his face. Relief flowed through her, and she slowed her pace._

_“Ben!” she called, “are you alright?”_

_“You’re back,” he said, his tone low and flat. He avoided the question, but that was fairly usual for this strange, dream-Ben that she now knew. She had smiled, tilting her head to the side slightly._

_“Obviously,” she said, a little bit of her old cheekiness finding its way into her voice. He slowly stood and moved away from her, another usual thing for him, but this time his movements seemed somehow… Stiffer. He was looking down at his hands, and though something seemed wrong about him, Rey couldn’t put her finger on it. She fought to keep her wavering smile on her face._

_“Why?” he asked. This threw her off-guard. Ben so rarely asked questions._

_“I… what do you mean, why?” she asked._

_“Why do you keep coming back, when I caused you so much misery. When I inflicted so much pain upon you.”_

_His words were like a slap in the face._

_“I… I don’t know,” she said, though that was a lie and she felt it the moment it curdled in her chest. He must have known it too._

_“I see,” he said. “I had hoped… Well.”_

_“You had hoped what?” Rey asked quickly, and Ben began to turn slowly on his heel to face her when the sand had opened up again._

_“No, wait-” she had begged, scrabbling at the edges of the pale sand, but she was already slipping down. _

Rey sat bolt upright in bed, a cold sweat covering her from head to toe. Though it was not even light yet, Rey knew that she would not be able to fall asleep again. It was only as the sun broke against the atrium roof that her mind finally picked up on the thing that had been bothering her about the dream, about Ben.

It was the cloak.

When he had stood up, the white that had covered little more than the furthest inch around the bottom edge of the hem had now creeped up, undeniably, to the bottom of his knees.


	4. And If You're Still Breathing, then You're the Lucky One

Rey was troubled by this realization.

Not because she was having any unreasonable thoughts about the reality of her dreams, however. No. She had determined from the very beginning that these were only dreams, and that there was no force work at play; though the look of the dreams resembled things she had experienced from the force, the energies themselves were all wrong. There was nothing peaceful in that silence, in that darkness, no secret comfort of being alone and yet surrounded by the knowledge of safety, of a legacy of love.

And Ben had said it himself, after all.

Just a dream.

No, the reason it troubled her was that it was starting to feel as though these dreams were temporary.

Rey was getting better. She could feel it. With each night that passed, she was able to awaken with just a little more lightness, a little more of herself intact again. Or, perhaps not quite intact. It felt more as if she was slowly stitching the tattered strings of herself back together. Slowly, she was drawing a needle through those fresh, stinging wounds and pulling, wrangling, reorganizing her entire self into the shape of something that felt halfway towards normal, if not quite the same as it used to be. Scabbed over and bruised, with silvery scars winding their way across its every surface, but… Normal.

She wasn’t ready to feel normal again.

As the weeks and the months crept past, Rey found the courage to begin searching internally, probing around once again for the searing pain that had once left her legs shaking and her vision blurring. And there were definitely parts of it still there; still aching, still torn, still reaching for something that wasn’t in the physical world any more. But no matter what she did, how hard she meditated and searched within herself, it never reached the intensity which she had shied away from at the beginning. She was somewhat surprised to find that she felt _guilty_ about that. As though her body was starting to wrap up its healing process and she was going to be left behind to deal with… Everything Else.

She hadn’t really considered the Everything Else part of it all.

That part of her – the part that had been drawn to Ben not purely as a result of their force bond – was something she had tried not to approach for the most part. She hadn’t ever been particularly good at examining her own feelings; for the most part, she had spent much of her time and energy either experiencing each emotion as it came to her without bothering to dig down too deeply, or she had been mercilessly squashing them entirely. That was, after all, how she had managed to forget the circumstances under which her parents had abandoned her on Jakku. They had certainly been nobodies, or at least they had been trying so hard to be, when they were forced to flee taking with them the gaze of the First Order and all of the ire of the Sith.

It was why she reached this very point, sitting alone in the late afternoon at her kitchen bench with a cup of herbal tea in her hand, having never bothered to process exactly what had driven her to reach out to Ben, in that dark shell of a cavern, and press their lips together. She hadn’t examined why she had felt a surge of relief and excitement and something undeniably _right_ and _good_ in the sensation of his body against hers, his mouth against hers. How his hands had shifted, one pressed into the small of her back, the other cupping her cheek, her neck, a thumb brushing a stray tear away from her eyes and tracking grime everywhere. How his eyes had been filled with such naked wonder, drinking in every piece of her with such fervor that she felt, for the first time in her entire life, truly seen.

She spoke to him. Words she had never said aloud before that tumbled from her lips, and she could feel the simple truth that they carried, as easily as stepping off a ledge into open air, opening your eyes to the sunlight.

_ “I love you.” _

Rey couldn’t remember saying those words, not at all, except there they were in her mind, clear as day, and the memory wouldn’t pause, wouldn’t stop on its path until it was over. She could suddenly recall the smile that had broken across his face; how it had been so utterly unstudied, so free, so very _real_, that when he fell backwards she hadn’t registered what was happening until it was all too late.

He had known what was going to happen before she did. He had known since the moment she had opened her eyes.

Rey’s tears went cold on her cheeks long before the tea in her shaking hands did.

She didn’t go to sleep that night.

…

It wasn’t something she consciously decided upon. It felt natural to her, honestly. Logical.

It had started at first with a little test, just to see how long she could go without sleeping at all. In case there was some kind of power outage, or she had to perform some kind of emergency repairs, or defend herself against sand people raids. You never knew when or why you might need to stay awake, but by the sun and the wind, Rey was going to be prepared. It was only practical, really.

By the 36-hour mark she had found a second wind, but that crashed by hour 42, when Rey almost tripped on the stairs and down the ten feet or so into the central atrium. Though hardly a near-death experience, she didn’t trust her own reflexes in this state to have stopped something catastrophic from happening. She had finally rested at that point, and Ben had been as distant as last time, though he seemed to have forgotten their previous discussion entirely. She slept for fourteen hours, that first night. Waking up had felt like emerging from deep water, her throat burning and her head pounding from the disorientation of it all. It was only as she sat up that she noticed the small asteroid field of floating rocks, orbiting around her like planets to the sun. She waved a hand, and they all dropped to the floor with a muffled, slightly sandy clatter. She tried not to be too relieved by this manifestation of her power.

_ You’re not dead yet,_ she had reminded herself.

And so it had begun.

Rey started to take short naps in the mornings and early afternoons. They were not long enough to enter a dream cycle, she made sure of that, but long enough to refresh her for another six hours or so. She also redoubled her efforts in meditation, a practice she had left be while her internal balance was so deeply wounded. In the time that it had started to finally heal, however, she had found new priorities that superseded her need to not damage herself. She was more than happy to forestall her own supposed healing, for this sake at the very least. She hadn’t managed to levitate herself in the week or so since taking it back up, but occasionally she could hear the clack of small stones as they ricocheted gently off the surface of one another. Did it hurt to actively try and attune to the force in this state? Certainly. It was like she had headbutted a cliff face with both of her temples and she was choosing to dig her thumbs into the bruises that had formed over them. For hours on end. But, it helped her to focus, and she didn’t feel as though the hours she spent meditating ever contributed to her body’s need to sleep. She could go for hours afterwards without yawning or losing her train of thought.

She found herself new tasks to do in the evenings that she simply _ could not _ put down until the morning came, narrow bands of sunlight breaking into the rooms of the homestead. She had bartered for a tin of paint up at Tosche Station, but she had had to travel farther to find some stonemason’s tools. They were as difficult to obtain as Jawa teeth, so the locals told her, though she was surprised by this phrase, since Jawas were seemingly plentiful across the desert wastes, and so was the kind of stone that could benefit from a little carving. She had ignored the strange and concerned looks that followed her through those places.

The dark bruises under her eyelids really weren’t that bad.

Between servicing the vaporators (a near constant pursuit during her daylight hours), running, meditating, reading, and occasionally staring at the ceiling, Rey would collect pebbles from the jagged outcrops she was told marked the start of the sand people’s territory. She would scrape and scratch at these with her tools long into the nights, creating little figures and sigils that were meaningful to her. A slightly lopsided resistance crest. An x-wing fighter that she accidentally broke one of the wings off in its final carving stages. A little model version of her old desert speeder.

When the scraping of the rock began to get on her nerves, she would crack open the paint tin and start in a new corner of a room. The paint was honestly more of a whitewash, likely made from some kind of ochre and the most undrinkable of liquids, but it served its purpose. Rey painted from the bottom up, working intricate patterns across the walls. Telling stories, filling in gaps with the tiny, wiry brush. She painted plants that she had never even thought to exist before leaving Jakku, and animals that had been almost mythical until a year ago. She was no artist by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a nice feeling, to make this place her own, even if it was in such an impermanent way.

She wasn’t trying to avoid seeing Ben.

Quite the contrary, really.

But Rey could never voice it in the more rational parts of her mind.

…

It worked, for the most part. With her new schedule, Rey had managed to cut back the amount of time she spent dreaming to only twice a week. The Ben on the island never asked her where she had been, either, or why she had been away for so long. She took this as the final sign that he was only in her mind; after all, if he existed outside of her own strange, feverish, guilt-grief driven dreams, surely he would be aware of the time moving, and have experiences outside of herself. But he said nothing, and his eyes stayed ever pointed away from her own, and she lived in the comfort that whatever was happening was for her own benefit. The white at the base of his cloak didn’t seem to be moving much at all now, but Rey never quite felt right when she woke up anymore.

Just another thing to learn to live with, really.

…

It had all been going fine. It had been going _ well_, even.

But Rey had run out of paint, and she had only finished the first half of the central hallway.

She had also run out of food, technically, but since she had been intermittently forgetting to eat anyway, it was hardly high up on her list.

She had forgotten to fill a water bottle to the top, and she looked at the clear, powder blue sky without checking any of the weather radars and had thought _ yeah, I should be fine_. She had loaded herself up on the borrowed speeder the woman at Tosche Station had leant her (_it was my nephew’s, _she told her) without so much as a second thought.

She had been exhausted, but exhaustion had become her new normal, and in that, she had also become complacent.

Rey hadn’t realized her mistake until the wall of solid sand was in front of her. The sandstorm stretched high enough to block out half of the very sky, and it curved with the edges of the horizon. It was too close to outrun, and she was too far from home to make it back in time. Rey felt the cold weight of an old, stale fear rearing up from within her. A metallic taste coated her tongue, and her breath hitched as she pulled her goggles down and her scarf up to cover her mouth. She scanned her surroundings quickly, looking for anywhere on this barren plateau that she could take shelter.

There.

Far off to her right was a small outcrop of boulders, the kind that raiders found too open for setting traps in, but closed off enough to provide some small amount of coverage for Rey and her vehicle. With no other choice, she kicked its acceleration pedal into _go_ position, and the speeder lunged off to the right as fast as its engine would allow. The roar of the sandstorm was all around her, overpowering the high pitched whine of the motor, and she was panting sa the boulders rose up in front of her quickly but not quite quickly enough.

The sandstorm hit her with the force of a star destroyer.

Everything went dark. Rey felt the speeder underneath her career wildly off its course, and it was all she could do to hold on and pray. She growled, feral and wild and lost in the howling of the raging storm, and yanked the speeder’s steering gear in the direction she hoped was still the boulders. Incredibly, it almost completely obeyed, and she was about to crow in victory when the engine gave a muddy whine and sputtered to a dead stop.

The crash hurt about as much as could be expected.

The gravity generators gave out slowly, the speeder dropping in slow motion, but Rey barely had enough time to disconnect her boots from the pedals. Travelling at maximum speed, it rolled the moment that the nose touched the ground. Rey launched herself from the belly of the speeder right as it began is death spiral, but the winds caught her and she felt a horrific _crunch_ in her side as she was thrown back bodily against it. She bounced, and before she could register the path of the speeder she was on the ground, tumbling shoulder over shoulder. Her scarf came loose and she choked on a mouthful of powdered, cursed, dust. The winds whipped at it, trying to tear the loose scarf away from her, but she fought against it, scrabbling wildly to cover her face once more. Rey tried to pull herself to her feet, managing to get as far as her knees before the winds threatened to knock her over again. A litany of familiar pains had erupted across her body and she could taste fresh blood in her mouth.

_ Got to get to the boulders_, she thought weakly, even as she was blown onto her hands and knees. She had barely been on the ground longer than thirty seconds and her calves were already buried in sand.

_ Have to keep moving._

She couldn’t see more than a foot or so in front of her, and had no idea which direction the speeder had crashed in. She tried to reach out with the force, but she found that the panic rising in her chest was stifling everything, as was the sheer chaos of the storm.

_ So stupid,_ she chided herself, bitter, angry, and above all scared. She was dead if she stayed where she was. She would be buried completely in minutes, never to be seen again. So she started to crawl. One hand in front of the other, knocked onto her face again and again by the wind. She could only hope that someone was steering her in the right direction.

When her hand hit stone, so hard that her knuckles bled, she let out a sob of relief. She curled up into the wall of stone, and prayed.

Rey blacked out to the sound of the storm, whistling all around her. As her eyes blurred and faded, she could swear that she saw blinking bright lights, faint as a will-o-the-wisp, and a dark form enveloping her in its arms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Three chapters in three days - someone call the Vatican. 
> 
> Come and yell at me in the comments.


	5. Because Most of Us are Heaving Through Corrupted Lungs

_ “What are you doing here?” Ben asked. _

_Rey was standing in the darkness, as always, but this time she was right at the edge of the island. Her toes were barely a millimeter from the sand, but she wasn’t touching it. Ben was right in front of her, his huge figure standing still, shoulders hunched like a crow on a lonely fencepost. He was within arm’s reach, eyes cast to the side and away from her, but she could tell he was incredibly aware of her presence. Her breath was deafening in the otherwise total silence, and she couldn’t bring herself to find words. Any words at all, let alone the right ones._

_“Rey.” He said her name and she blinked, trying to swallow. Her mouth still tasted of blood, but she couldn’t remember why._

_“Rey,” Ben said again, his voice losing some of its flatness and the smallest hint of a command entered his tone._

_“I…” Rey swallowed again. She couldn’t move her feet, she realized._

_“I shouldn’t be here,” she said softly, and a small look of alarm crossed Ben’s otherwise stony, melancholic features._

_“What happened, Rey,” he asked her, urgency flooding his voice and giving his words a surprising energy, a surprising speed. “Where are you. Is anyone with you, are you hurt-”_

_“I’m right here,” Rey said with a frown. “And you’re with me. Aren’t you?”_

_Confusion was something she had grown used to when standing in the darkness beside him, but it had never been quite like this. _ He_ had never been quite like this. His arm flinched upwards slightly and he drew it quickly back to his side, at first clenching his fist so hard that his knuckles turned white, then extending his fingers out so wide that the tendons seemed to jump out of his very skin, as though they were on fire. He turned his bowed head from one side to the other, sharply, like an animal listening to a predator on the hunt._

_“Rey, listen to me,” he said, his voice intent, and she dragged her molasses brain to attention as best she could. “You have to let me go. If you are injuring yourself for me – if I am causing you yet more pain…”_

_“I’m alright,” Rey said, though she wasn’t quite certain of that fact. “It was just an accident.” His eyes welled up at that, some fresh emotion bubbling up from within._

_“I don’t think it was, Rey,” he said. “Just look at yourself.”_

_If he was really an apparition, why was his voice so riddled with the sound of a wet, livid, anger? She slowly tilted her head and looked down at her chest; she could see the fresh bloom of dried blood caking the left side of her torso, with yet more pouring out of her even as she watched. It darkened the white fabric, and she realized it was the first time she had seen colour in this place._

_“I don’t want you here,” Ben said. He settled his feet into the sand, standing firm._

_“You should not be here with me.” As he said this, Rey could see something creeping up the back of his cloak, bleaching it before her eyes. It sent a bolt of alarm through her, and she reached out in a panic._

_“Ben, no,” she tried, and her hand almost made it to him. But she was falling backwards into that black, solid water beneath her._

_Too late._

_Always too late._

_The last thing she saw was his chin lifted regally, standing at attention, his eyes empty, but his jaw clenched and his lips trembling in a silent grimace of devastation. _

…

Rey came to slowly, and not all of her senses at once. She could feel the familiar scratch of her bedroll against the backs of her legs, and the skin of her wrists. The sounds were all wrong, though; beyond the moaning of the wind, which was presumably the torrent of sand still moving overhead and all around, there was the sound of a pot burbling from further away, and a chattering, cooing sound nearby that was familiar. However, it was not familiar to Rey within this place, and certainly not from the months of solitude she had been living in. She slowly, painfully cracked open one gritty eye. It took a moment for it to focus on the ceiling, and she got lost for a moment or two in the swirling white patterns she had painted there.

_ Home. _

The thought had fallen into her head with a surprising lack of fanfare, but it felt right.

She rolled over onto her side with a quiet groan, and one of her hands came up to feel the bandages wrapped around her torso. As she shifted she could feel the distinct, slick texture of bacta gel against the bare skin underneath.

She settled onto her side and was finally relaxing again when she felt the slightest of breezes against her forehead.

And again. And again.

She opened both of her eyes at once, startled. There, not a foot away from her, was the round form of BB-8. She watched as the little droid retracted the little tube it had used to blast air against her face and chittered away in astromech, its visual processing unit bobbing up and down like a cockatiel before zooming out of the room.

_ Where in the world-_ Rey thought as she pulled herself painfully from her bedroll. It made no sense. It was completely incongruous with everything around her, and Rey wondered if she had finally snapped. She staggered upon standing and had to catch herself on the hewn out desk opposite her bed, the stone edges worn soft over the decades. Her legs weren’t particularly inclined to cooperate with her, in particular her left ankle, which she recalled struggling to yank from the foot wells that allowed her to steer the speeder.

_ I’ve really done it this time, haven’t I,_ she thought with a little huff. So, not trusting the stability of her lower half, she hand-over-handed her way to the wall and then out into the doorframe, leaning heavily on her forearm against it. She noted, vaguely, that someone had activated the sandstorm protocols in the house’s system, and the atrium had sealed itself over with a solid, metallic material. It was rusted but holding well, she noted, and satisfied with this she cast her eyes down to the ground level again. She had to see where that cheeky little droid had gone.

The droid in question was nudging a figure in black in the leg, and though his back was to her, she could see the affection he felt towards the robot.

Finn looked up from the book he was reading, for all of the world as though he lived there.

“Hi,” she said, a weak smile on her face, and immediately doubled over with wracking coughs.

“Rey,” he said, alarmed, and he was on his feet at once. He wordlessly moved to her side to help her as she started to slide down the wall. The sight of him made her want to cry, want to laugh, want to scream, but all she did instead was offer him a quiet _thank you_. He put his arm gently around her waist and she hissed in pain, but his broad shoulders offered a welcome support as they moved towards the central table that was carved into the space just outside the kitchen. She tried not show just how touch-starved she was, but if she clung to him a little more heavily than was strictly necessary, it wasn’t her fault. He lowered her into a seat, and she took some relief in thinking that honestly, no matter what, she couldn’t possibly look any worse than when he had last seen her.

“You look worse than when I last saw you,” he said matter of factly, as though he had pulled the thought straight from her head.

“That’s not fair,” she said, aiming for a smile. He sat down opposite her and looked her in the eyes, a single eyebrow raised at her in an _uh uh, sure_.

“What happened, Rey.”

How odd it was to hear those words again from someone else. She felt a chill stretch up her back.

“Nothing happened,” she tried, but he gave her a severe look. She sighed, placing her hands on the table for something to focus on other than his damn look of concern.

“Alright, something happened. I made a mistake. I was tired, and I simply… made a mistake.”

“Rey, there are mistakes, and then there are _death wishes_,” he said. “Do you have a death wish?”

“I most certainly do _not _,” Rey bristled, but it seemed that her response was not enough to convince him.

“You know that’s not what I meant,” he tried, opening his palms to her in placation, “but what I’m seeing isn’t exactly reassuring. Poe is _pissed,_ Rey. Poe is _worried_ about you. _I_ am worried about you. When you left, I was trusting you to look after yourself, even though _every fibre of my being_ wanted to come after you, to follow you, to protect you from yourself.”

“I don’t – I don’t need protection from myself, Finn,” Rey said, offended. Finn just rolled his eyes.

“I get it Rey, really I do. You’ve never needed protecting, have you? It’s always just been you, getting by on your own. Is that really all it boils down to? IS that why you insisted on doing it all alone, no matter how much we wanted to help, told you we were right behind you, right there? Why didn’t you ever let us help you, Rey?”

Rey could hear the deeper, more frustrated question he was asking underneath it all. _ Why won’t you let me help you now?_

“It’s not that simple this time,” she said, her voice small and defensive, and he scoffed at her.

“Nothing ever is,” he replied, dismissive.

“Then maybe it’s not your concern,” she bit back at him.

“Since you are my _best and closest friend,_ it actually _is_ my concern, Rey,” he said, and she could tell from the slight edge in his voice that he was trying incredibly hard to be patient with her.

“Rey, please. Explain it to me. I really _am_ trying to understand.” He reached out with one large, warm hand but she pulled away.

“No, you’re not,” she replied, “I don’t think you’re trying at all.”

Finn’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. She tried to lift herself up to her feet, hot tears starting to bubble in the corners of her vision.

“If you were actually trying to understand, you wouldn’t be asking me these- these- questions as if I’m some sort of unstable lunatic!” It was only then that she noticed the books propped open on Finn’s side of the table.

Luke’s books.

Her books.

Finn had been flicking through them, reading the sacred, closed texts of the Jedi as if they were for _casual consumption._

“What were you doing with those,” Rey asked, her voice a deathly, dangerous hush. Finn’s eyes widened as he realized.

“Rey, please, listen-”

“No, _you listen!_” she spat, and though she could feel herself spiraling somewhere she didn’t want to go, she was already gaining too much momentum.

“What happened to me on Exogul was far worse than you could have _ever imagined,_ Finn. I lost something that goes beyond _any mortal or physical reckoning._ Part of me _died _on that planet, Finn. I, quite literally, _died. _ But now, in some convoluted and hideously ironic twist of fate, I’m still here!” her voice was growing shrill but she wasn’t ready to stop. “I’m still here, _stuck_, and I can still see him, and he’s _dead, Finn, he’s gone._ And if I sleep, I know I’ll lose him, and every part of me just wants to stay there, wherever _there_ is. I can’t sleep, even if I want to, _desperately,_ because if I do I will eat away at him until every last shred of my memory of him is _gone._”

Silence reigned over them, and Rey’s eyes watered as she fought the urge to cough up more of Tatooine’s bleached and barren dirt from her lungs. Finn said nothing for a long time, sitting still and silent, shock and pain crisscrossing his features. He wiped his face against his sleeve in a not-so-covert attempt to wipe away the tear that had started to track down one of his cheeks.

“I’m so sorry, Rey,” he said finally. He was nodding to himself. “I’m sorry that you’ve felt all alone, all this time.” He went to stand, and Rey could sense his intention to leave.

“Wait,” she said. “Please.”

He paused, already standing, one hand resting on the surface of the table.

“I’m just trying to help, Rey,” he said, his voice thick. “It’s all I’ve ever done.”

“I know,” she said, her eyes wide and empty and wet. She was shaking her head in misery. “I’m so sorry, Finn. I can’t- I’m so sorry-” Her small hands were reaching out for him and he came to her willingly. Her fingers plucked at his sleeves and he was on his knees next to her seat, pulling her close in the most welcome hug she had ever felt.

Rey wasn’t sure if the coughing fits were coming as a result of the abject sobbing that heaved its way through her body, or whether it was the other way around. It didn’t really matter in the end; they blended seamlessly enough into one another and back again. He held her tight in his warm, unhesitating arms, and didn’t pull away until long after the last tears had well and truly dampened his jacket. It was not a dignified cry, or a pretty one; it was the kind of cry that beat her body against a rock and wringed her out and hung her up to dry. Finn was not immune to it either; as she felt his shoulders shake, Rey wondered if he had had the chance to cry at all since the final battle.

When all had fallen quiet and they were simply breathing against each other, heads resting on the other’s shoulders, Rey had nodded and pulled back slightly. Finn had followed suit, watching her carefully as he did so.

“I, uh…” Rey started, her voice utterly hoarse, and Finn shook his head.

“It’s okay,” he offered her with a shake of the head.

“… I was just going to ask if you wanted a cup of tea,” she finished, and it took a moment of silence for the ridiculousness of her own suggestion to hit them both. They both broke out into matching, semi-hysterical grins, and he helped her to her feet as they moved to the kitchen to boil some water.

…

They broke bread together. Finn had insisted on doing everything for her, and she had been forced to content herself with giving directions from her seat at the table. Finn had somehow worked wonders with the standard rations, and even had a stash of fresh off-world produce to share with her. He had cut up a small selection of fruits from one of the many tropical planets the resistance was now based upon, and the juiciness of her first bite made Rey want to weep all over again. They had shared all manner of stories with each other. Finn had given her updates on the movements of the resistance and the various missions-gone-wrong he had helped to orchestrate. The repatriation movement had finally sourced enough ships to begin, and enough ex-troopers were now able to access their identities that they could send out waves of ships, full of stolen children, to finally return to their communities if they wished to.

Of course they all did.

Rey told him about Tatooine, about what she had been up to (at least in regards to the renovations and maintenance of the place), and she eventually gave him the unfiltered version of her experience on Exogul. She even told him about the true reasons behind Ben’s last minute defection back to the force, their battle on the ruined death star, their shared visions, and the dyadic bond that had linked it all. Releasing that secret, sharing it… It hadn’t felt as world-ending as she thought it would. Sure, Finn had drawn in a sharp breath at the revelation, and had taken a moment to stare off into space, contemplating its implications.

“I never felt any of that,” Finn admitted, “the good in him. But I suppose I didn’t have a reason to try.” He flinched, and Rey could suddenly see Finn, face down in the snow, clothes tattered and skin bleeding and smoking from lightsaber wounds. She couldn’t apologise for him, couldn’t atone for him. Not to Finn. And it was too late for Ben to do it now.

“I would have tried to, you know. For your sake. I might have even forgiven him. I’m disappointed that I never got the chance to.” His eyes were leveled at her when he said that, and Rey could see his sincerity in them. She was so startled by this admission that she had to look away from him and stare at the ceiling for a moment, lest she burst into tears again.

But the conversation had moved on, and Rey’s planet continued to turn, and it was all right. The months apart fell away as easily as cobwebs, and they were able to laugh together, the distress of before forgotten almost entirely.

“How did you find me?” Rey asked him, long into the evening hours.

Finn had looked up from the part of the wall paintings that he was inspecting when she asked her question and looked at her. Rey was worried that he hadn’t been able to hear her over the still moaning winds outside.

“We were able to track your location through a number of your transactions about a week after you left,” he said matter-of-factly, though the way he cast his eyes away showed at least a semblance of shame at the thought. “It wasn’t difficult to figure out where you would be from those, since it’s Skywalker’s home planet and all.”

Rey nodded, having suspected as much. Something about it still itched at her, though.

“Why did you come now, then? And how did you find me out there in the storm?”

Finn remained silent for a moment.

“You called to me,” he said softly. “Don’t you remember?”

She didn’t have an answer to that, and he turned to look at her again.

“I heard you,” he continued, “In my head. You were calling out for help, whether you meant to or not.”

“I don’t understand,” she said finally, “How could you have possibly-”

A pebble bumped into her shoulder gently.

Rey lifted a hand to it, to shoo it away almost absent-mindedly, but it zipped out of her reach and hovered, twirling delicately, two inches above the palm of Finn’s hand. He was looking down at it himself, or at least, his head was bowed towards it. Rey felt her mouth fall open of its own accord.

“I tried to tell you,” he said, and as he raised his head it fell into the palm of his hand, still once more. “I tried to tell you so many times.”

“Finn,” she said, breathless, and as she consciously reached out with her own power or the first time since the battle, she could finally sense it. Humming through his veins, shifting around him in golden eddies and whorls, was the force. It moved through him, and he through it.

Rey suddenly had images of Finn, all alone, trying to harness and control something that he hadn’t had even the first inkling of a lesson about. Rey, brushing him off every time he came to ask her something, to _tell _ her something. She had left him at the base to deal with it, all alone. The guilt was overwhelming, and she was on her feet and across the room before she could even register it.

“This is only recent,” Finn said, as though he could feel the cacophony of swirling emotions moving through her. Hell, he probably _could_.

“It only started after you left. I think I was starting to feel the slightest hints of it before then, though.” This didn’t particularly help how Rey was feeling; it still meant he had been out there for months, almost exactly as she had pictured. She sat down with him on the ground where he was crouched, and took the smooth stone from his hand. It was dark and smooth and glossy, like a river pebble, but it was not any kind of stone that occurred naturally on Tatooine. Finn must have brought it with him, a tiny talisman to practice with.

“Did you tell-”

“Poe doesn’t know,” Finn said quietly. “He wouldn’t understand. If I told him, he’d – he’d treat it as an asset, as a resource, and he’d send me out on missions with the teams and-” he paused, gathering himself and pressing his lips together into a fine line that always meant he was searching for the right phrase.

“You felt you were needed elsewhere,” Rey finished for him.

“With the stormtrooper project, yeah,” he said, relief passing through him. Rey opened her mouth to speak, closed it again.

“Finn,” she started, “I’m so sorry. If I had known –”

“Don’t,” Finn interrupted. “It’s not your fault. You couldn’t have possibly known. And even if you did, no offense,” he said, eyeing her up and down with the slightest glint of amusement, “I don’t think you were in any shape to be trying to _teach_ anyone about the _Jedi ways_.” Rey could hear the inverted commas around his last words, and she smacked him on the leg for his cheek. He grinned at her and she grinned back.

“I’m still not quite sure you are,” he continued, his face contorting itself into something sassy and utterly satirical and she laughed and smacked him again.

“Hey! You’re breaking the Jedi code! Jedi never attack, only defend!” Finn rolled back onto his haunches, batting away her hands as she smacked him again for good measure.

" I am defending myself,” she said. “Doesn’t say anywhere that a physical defense can’t be invoked against a verbal attack.” They settled again, slowly, and Rey realized that Finn must have read those words in one of the books.

“You’re welcome to read them,” she said, and Finn knew what she was referring to immediately.

“I still should have asked, I know.” Rey shook her head.

“It’s alright. I overreacted.” She paused as she stifled an enormous yawn.

“Okay master Jedi, I think it’s time for you to go to bed,” Finn joked, and Rey couldn’t quite stifle the bright spike of fear that washed over her. Finn’s cheerfulness dropped away and he raised a hand to her cheek, a look of concern once again on his face.

“Are you alright?” he asked. She started to nod, started to shake her head, and smiled lest she start to cry at the ridiculousness of herself. He lifted her chin, raised her eyes to meet his.

“Hey. They’re only dreams, right?”

Rey nodded.

“Only dreams,” she confirmed. He nodded, and they wordlessly got to their feet. Or at least, Finn got to his feet, and Rey winced as she tried to unfold her legs from the stone floor, and Finn helped give her a hand up.

“I’ll be right here,” he told her, walking her to her room. “I’ll stay awake all night for you if I have to.”

“There’s no need for that,” she said, and she meant it. Despite her initial reaction to the thought of sleep, she knew that she needed it. She resigned herself to it. And she wasn’t alone anymore. So maybe, just maybe, it would be alright. He saw her to her doorway, and she made her way to the bed from there. He waited until she was crawled underneath the blankets before saying goodnight.

“Hey Finn?”

He hesitated in the door, his face hidden in silhouette by the soft light outside of the room.

“I think Poe would understand. If you told him.”

His head dipped, and she thought she could almost see a smile on his face.

…

_ “You came back.”_

_The shore of the island was a few feet away, and Rey took this to be a positive sign._

_“I’m sorry I frightened you before,” she called. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I made a mistake.”_

_There was movement at the farthest end of the island; a grey shape shifted, rose from the ground._

_“It’s not enough,” the figure said. “I don’t want to hold you back any longer. I’m not worth it.” Rey’s head shook in disbelief._

_“Of course you are,” she breathed. “You are worth more to me than I could ever put in words.” She had stepped onto the shore without ever registering her own movement and she was walking towards him. The island seemed to warp and shift under her feet, not enough to hinder the dreamscape entirely but enough to make her feel constantly off balance, constantly wrong. She was closer to him now but every movement was becoming harder, the sand sucking at her feet with every step. His shoulders were slumped beneath the cloak, which was white all the way to his elbows now._

_“Ben,” Rey said, voice pleading, “please. I… I need to tell you something.”_

_“Not here,” he said. “Please, not here.”_

_Rey frowned, and was about to ask him where _here_ even was, when something made her stop._

_A voice._

_There was a voice calling out to her._

_“Rey!”_

_Both of the island’s lonely occupants turned towards the sound. Through the solid black, she could make out a tiny, indistinct figure moving closer, and faster, and she could hear the soft splash of the dark surface of the water. The figure was so familiar, but it seemed to waver in the pitch black, flickering like a holoscreen on its last legs. It wasn’t until it stopped running, fifty yards from the island’s shore, that she recognized them._

_“Finn?”_

_The darkness swallowed her up again._

_…_

Rey’s eyes flew open and she was out of her sheets, practically tripping over herself to get up. She had almost made it to the door when Finn’s form filled it, his eyes so wide that she could see the whites of them in the pre-dawn light. He was panting, and it was only seeing his chest heaving beneath his shirt, and the sweat that beaded his face, that she started to click everything together.=

“Rey,” Finn gasped, and his whole body seemed to shiver with exhilaration.

“That wasn’t just a dream. That was _Ben._”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Muahahaha! 
> 
> Does anybody know the song lyrics I'm referencing for the chapter titles? It's Youth by Daughter. Definitely worth listening to. 
> 
> As always, come yell at me in the comments, and I'm sorry to those of you who thought that it was Ben pulling a prince charming on Rey in the sandstorm. 
> 
> This is a fix-it for the WHOLE film, not just the Reylo stuff! Finn and Poe deserved better, too.


	6. To Distract Our Hearts From Ever Missing Them

“Finn, don’t-”

“Rey, give it to me!” Finn swiped for the book that she held in her hands.

“I really don’t think-”

“I can’t believe you haven’t _read it, are you kidding me_-”

“I _have_ read it, Finn, but it was a while ago-”

“Was that before or _after_ your dead soulmate - or whatever it’s called - started hanging out with you on a secret getaway dream island?” Finn made a pass for the book she was desperately trying to keep out of his reach, but even in her injured state the force was feeling kind to her. She managed to pivot away from him on the edge of her boot heel and he grunted as he ran into the leg of stone bench. He swept her leg and she yelped, the book diving across the room.

“Before! It was before!” She cried. “I don’t remember what it said!”

“And you didn’t think it might, _maybe_ have something important to say about this whole dyad nonsense?!” he wheezed, making a leap for the book as Rey scrambled on hands and knees to keep it away from him. They must have looked a sight; Rey, haggard, her hair matted and stuck her skin where cold sweat was drying and circles under her eyes dark enough to hide a small rebel battalion, and Finn, equally sweaty, eyes bright and manic with a new energy. She put her hand out, fingers splayed, and pulled the book towards her with the force. It flew past Finn’s head, missing by less than an inch, and she caught it against her chest with a heavy _whump_. She curled around the book protectively, like an armadillo.

“I was _scared!”_ she admitted, words tumbling out as though they had been snatched from her, and Finn went still.

“I was scared, and I was broken.” She said. “It seemed pointless. Like- I don’t know. Like reading the manual for a spaceship you’ll never fly.”

Finn knelt beside her. The fight in him was gone, and Rey suddenly wondered if he had ever actually wanted the book, or if he had been playing her into confessing all of this.

“You told me that you spent most of your childhood reading manuals for spaceships you’d never fly,” he reminded her.

“Then it’s a bad example,” she said, and the edge of her mouth quirked up in a humorless smile.

“Are you sure you didn’t have some other reason?” He asked her gently. She snorted.

“Of course I have other reasons,” she said. “I was disappointed. I was grieving. I _am_ grieving. If you could feel the pain that has been sitting, right here in my-” Rey went to press a hand against her chest, but it simply wasn’t accurate, “in my _everywhere_, then you would probably think twice about reading the manual for- for a spaceship that you’d just been told was yours, shiny and new and _yours_, that then destroyed itself on impact in front of you only moments later, before you ever even got to take it for a spin.”

“You’re really enjoying that spaceship metaphor, aren’t you,” Finn said after a pause, and Rey was about to snap at him when he raised a hand in ceasefire. “But, I think I get it.”

“I saw him die, Finn,” Rey said, her voice quiet even in the stillness of the morning. “There was nothing left of him. Reading it, knowing exactly what I had already lost, would have just made me feel awful. Or worse, I might have tried to twist whatever words it had to say into something resembling hope where there was none.” She kept her eyes on the floor, dragged a single finger through the thin coating of sand. Finn sighed, and ran a hand through his hair.

“So let me read it for you,” Finn offered.

“I have no particular desire to have Kylo Ren- or any iteration thereof - back in the land of the living. I don’t like the guy. In fact, I kind of hate him, a lot. He’s done more evil than he would possibly atone for in a single lifetime,” he continued, in spite of the severe look from Rey, “but, I know how badly you’re hurting. And I know, however poor your taste in men may be, that you don’t entirely have a choice in who you’re bonded to. I stand by what I said last night; I’m disappointed for myself that I didn’t get a chance to at least try and forgive him for what he did. Let me read the book, Rey. I’m not about to start grasping at straws just to let you down, but I’m also not going to let you waste away in the shadows, all alone, because of a situation that could potentially be fixed. _ Trust me_ to read it for you.”

Rey closed her eyes, and nodded once.

“Alright then,” Finn said, and Rey opened her eyes and watched as he slowly, carefully took the tome from her lap. She followed him wordlessly as he took it to the table, cracking it open gently. It was easily a 700 page book, with weathered and uneven page edges, and yet it opened directly onto the opening image for the Dyad paragraphs. Rey could already see was the dualistic energy diagram.

_ How very convenient of you,_ she grumbled internally towards the book, and she could swear she felt a nudge of distant amusement against her mind, distinctly not her own. The page was mesmerizing, the swirling letters shifting under Finn’s touch as he drew one finger lightly down the page. A sound like dead radio static filled her ears, and she leaned forward, closer to the page.

“Hey,” Finn said, and Rey’s eyes snapped up. The radio static stopped immediately, and Rey shook her head. He met her expression evenly, knowingly.

“How about you go and make us some tea? This might take a while.”

Rey knew a dismissal when she heard one, and she was grateful for it.

…

The section of the book was larger than Rey remembered it. Finn had scanned through the pages while she boiled water and set the cups out, and by the time she came back with two steaming mugs and a pot of extra brewed tea, he had slid one finger in between the pages to mark the place where the section ended. She could have sworn that there had only been a cursory paragraph or two in there when she had first gone through the book herself months ago, and yet the section of book Finn was balancing looked to be a significant wedge of it. He thanked her for the tea, glancing up briefly with a smile before sinking back into the pages, his brow furrowed and his mouth moving silently with each sentence. Rey sat down opposite him to drink her tea. She was forced to move after a few minutes, because she kept finding herself staring at the pages and they were giving her a headache. Finn wasn’t as used to reading the specific language of force users as she was, so it was going to take him a lot longer to move from page to page. She found herself somewhat at a loss for what to do, and that was maddening in its own right. After the first half hour of silence Rey could no longer take it.

“BB-8?” she called, and Rey heard him chitter in astromech before sticking his head out of one of the small rooms, curious.

“Want to come check the vaporators with me?” She asked, and the little droid lit up in excitement. It whizzed across the floor to bump lovingly against her shin, and she gave a warm laugh.

“Okay, hold on, I need to go get my things,” she said, and a quick glance at Finn showed that he had taken no notice. She quickly pulled together a little rucksack of things (water, tools for repairs, a couple of spools of wires just in case anything had come loose or blown away in the sandstorm)and when she reemerged Finn was still in exactly the same position. He did, however, look up briefly at her.

“Are you sure you’re alright to go out?” he asked, and Rey might have bristled a little at that if it wasn’t Finn, and if she hadn’t almost died in a sandstorm less than 48 hours ago.

“I’ll be alright,” she offered with a reassuring smile. “I’ll have BB-8 with me.”

Finn nodded, and went back to his reading. She placed a hand on his shoulder as she walked by.

“Thank you,” she said.

Finn didn’t answer.

…

The door of the Skywalker Homestead only managed to open one-third of the way before grinding to a stop. Three feet of sand had built up in the stairwell, and now that sand was flowing onto the alcove in which she was standing, hissing as it settled. BB-8 gave a yelp of surprise at the sudden wave that spilled across the floor, and its gyroscopic body spun quickly to try and stay above the deluge that almost threatened to sweep it off the landing. Rey sighed, and picked up her old quarter staff from where it had been leant against the doorframe. She had strapped a rectangular scrap of metal to one end during her first days in the Homestead, and it had come in handy as a makeshift shovel.

_At least this is still distracting,_ she thought to herself as she got to work clearing the doorway. BB-8 watched with interest.

It was hard work but it was quick work, and it only took about ten minutes for her to reach the point where she was scraping each stair down to its gritty stone base. Rey had worked up quite the sweat already, but she was pleased with her work. She hit the door close mechanism with a heavy _thunk_ and it released, along with another generous heaping of sand that had been caught in the door’s wall cavity.

“Shall we?” Rey asked the droid, who chittered at her once again. They set off, and with the sunshine beating down on her face, Rey felt something kindling in her chest for the first time in months.

_Maybe it would be alright. _

The vaporators had definitely seen better days, Rey decided. Despite their hardy and desert-resistant design, the sheer age of each of them left them open to all sorts of malfunctions every time a sandstorm rolled through, and this one was no exception. Rey spent the first hour or so walking between each of the rough-dozen ‘functional’ vaporators to sweep off their solar panels and check their overall energy levels. At each of them, she made a mental note of any fixes she would need to pause and actually do, and what she could delegate to BB-8. One vaporator’s control panel door had been pulled off by all but one screw, and was squeaking in the slight breeze as she approached. The wiring was tangled and covered in sand but overall still looked sturdy, so she had put the droid on that task. Others however weren’t quite as easy. One of the moisture filters had been clogged entirely with sand, which had set into a concrete-like mud on contact with the sandstorm. She had been forced to scrape it down on both sides, being careful not to damage the filter itself, and then she had to pour some of the precious collected water over the top of the filter to ensure that all the grime had been cleared out.

_Such a waste,_ she thought to herself, but it was better than all the other thoughts that could have scrambled about inside her mind at that point.

She was trying very, very hard not to think about what Finn may have to say at the end of his reading.

The pressure of it was driving her mad.

…

She had fought the urge to run back to the house. The vaporators were all steadily humming away, and she had collected the water in a large skin and slung it across her back to put into the storage tanks. Her body was feeling the strain of the work, and she wasn’t used to being awake and moving during the brightest hours of the day any more, but it was… Nice. It felt right. Receptors were firing off, her eyes were brighter and her mind felt clearer than it had in a long while. The constant chatter and easy company of the droid definitely helped to keep her mood high, as well. It was this general feeling of almost-contentedness that allowed her to detour away from the homestead and over to the Millennium Falcon. The spaceship was standing behind the homestead, about fifty yards from the front door, but she hadn’t had the headspace to really admire it earlier. Now, she could see it as it was; a proud, old girl, rising above the drifting wastes of the desert. Rey stood leaning against the landing gear, and let her head rest against the solid metal frame. Her eyes drifted closed, and she could sense the breadth of its history. This old girl had seen so much courage, so much bravery, so much love in her time.

The wind danced across her face, and she felt the tickle of her own hair dragging across her skin. The sensation was soothing in the shade.

She patted its leg companionably, and pushed herself away.

She was ready to know what the future held.

She just hoped that Finn was ready to tell her.


	7. And If You're In Love, then You are the Lucky One

Finn was still sitting at the table when Rey returned to the homestead, his back to her as she descended the staircase. She could still feel the sting of the wind against her cheeks, but it was a good kind of feeling, and she was appreciating a particularly good tale that BB-8 was telling her about Poe’s childhood. Contrary to Poe’s grim assertions that he had been a spice runner in his younger, more troubled years, BB-8 had the literal photographic memory that only droids can maintain, and asserted that Poe’s version was vastly overrated. He had run a single smuggling mission at the behest of the Resistance, and according to BB-8 he had done this with the express permission of his own parents, who were both deeply loyal to and active within the resistance until the time of their deaths.

The mission was meant to be a way of ingratiating himself within a criminal organisation which the Resistance had heard was supplying rare and protected mineral resources to the First Order for the development of a new weapon. They had wanted him to set himself up as a young smuggler within their ranks and gather as much intel as possible. To Poe’s mortification, the ‘rare minerals’ being stocked into his ship were actually just pallets and pallets of spice. The particular strain was known for its stimulant and anti-fatigue properties. The crew he was working with said that the drugs were being fed to the First Order’s chain-gang workers so that they would be able to work long past the need of rest, and drop dead on the working platform instead of going to bed.

Poe’s moral obligations to the indoctrinated workers of the First Order had apparently forced him to do two things he had never done before; he had chosen to blow the operation, and he did so by deliberately letting the ship get caught by the slower and infinitely less skilled ships captained by the local regulating forces. He had been monitoring their patterns for a few weeks for the sake of avoiding them, but this information proved just as effective for this particular purpose instead. Had he been arrested along with everyone on board that ship? Of course. Had it been placed on his record, then quietly wiped away a few months later by a mysterious, encrypted program of Resistance origin? Perhaps. But the operation had still been detrimental to Poe’s reputation on that planet, and there had been several low-level hits put out on him by that criminal organisation as a result.

This story had provided Rey with a lot of amusement; of course Poe would view committing crimes under the guise of covert intelligence missions as the genuine thing, and of course he had felt guilty about doing it with all the remorse of a truly reformed criminal, instead of a spy in the line of duty. Poe’s world view was so black-and-white, with no space for nuance or compromise, and it was one of his greatest strengths and yet also one of his deepest weaknesses. He had always thrown himself fully into everything that he did, this much she knew.

In all of the sadness and pain she had seen, all the impossible decisions they had been forced to make, it was reassuring in some small way to know that at least Poe’s dark past wasn’t half as dark as he had made it sound.

Rey had dropped her gear in her room as BB-8 continued to ramble, and she was so engrossed in this story that she didn’t notice Finn’s state until she had walked most of the way to the kitchen.

“Do you need anything to eat?” She asked over her shoulder, a smile still playing on her features, “I’m starving.”

“Rey.”

The tone of his voice made her stop short, and she spun to look at him. In front of Finn lay the book, but it was closed, and Finn was staring into empty space.

“Finn?” Rey asked, uncertain, and a rush of dread washed over her. His eyes slowly dragged themselves up to meet hers, and Rey had to sit down.

“I finished reading,” he said. Rey waited for him to say something more, but he didn’t.

“And? What did you find out?” She asked, unable to contain herself.

“There’s so much you need to know,” Finn said, and Rey waited patiently as he began, all thoughts of food or good humour gone.

…

“So what you have described to me – the way Exogul went down – might not be the complete story,” he said, and Rey started to open her mouth in protest.

“Don’t interrupt me,” Finn said quickly, and Rey’s mouth snapped shut. “I don’t mean that what you told me wasn’t true – just that you don’t have the full story.”

“You said that after defeating Palpatine, you fell unconscious and came to in Ben’s arms,” Finn continued. “And that you spoke briefly, and then his body faded and you were alone. That he died in front of you after being perfectly fine moments before.”

Rey nodded.

“Well, I don’t think you passed out, Rey.” Finn clasped his hands in front of him on the table. “I think you died.”

“What.” The blood drained from her face. Finn leant forward, his voice hushed and his eyes intense.

“I think when you said that Ben gave his life to save you, it wasn’t just a metaphor. He gave his life over to you, actively, and willingly, and that was what brought you back.”

“It’s not possible,” Rey breathed, and she felt ill. Finn snorted.

“I have spent the whole day reading about how, when it comes to Dyads, practically nothing is impossible.”

“Why would he do that,” she murmured, and Finn gave her an incredulous look.

“You _know_ why.” He sighed, and scrubbed a hand across his face.

“So… He’s gone, then?” She asked finally. She was proud that she managed to get the words out before her throat closed up, quite involuntarily. She swallowed. “And what I’ve been seeing is just the echoes of him?”

“Physically? Yes, he is gone. Echoes? Not so much.” He looked her level in the eyes.

“He’s still alive, Rey. _Inside_ you.”

Rey didn’t think that her stomach could drop further, but it did.

“He’s what.”

“I know,” Finn said. “terrifying, right? But he’s in there. From what I can tell from this damn book-” he shot a resentful look at the book, but the book did nothing, “- the act of him transferring that last bit of energy – of _life force_ \- over to you caused him to kind of, bottom out? And he must have come untethered from his physical form. So he’s still there.”

Rey let out a long breath of air, and looked down at herself as though she would suddenly be able to see him, his energy floating inside of her like some kind of nebulous orb. The side of her ribs tickled slightly, and she raised a hand to it. It was where Ben’s hand had been when she had come to in that dark throne room, and knowing what he had done, _truly knowing_, she felt a whole new mess of emotions rise up inside. She pushed them back down however. She could examine them later.

“Do you think he knew?” She asked. Finn opened his hands in a ubiquitous gesture of ‘I don’t know’.

“Unlikely,” Finn said. “He always struck me as the ‘hack with a lightsabre first, ask questions later’ type of person.” He stopped himself, his gaze softening.

“It’s more likely that he just thought he would die. He probably thought it would make up for all the other things he had done.”

Rey nodded slowly.

“So when he appears in my dreams…”

“They’re not entirely dreams,” Finn confirmed. “The dyad – the life force connection you have – it’s unparalleled as far as its versatility. This is going to sound ridiculous,” Finn started flipping through the pages of the book, frantically, “but when you’re dreaming, it kind of lowers the barrier between the two of you and the planes on which you currently exist.” He found what he was looking for and spun the book towards her, showing her an old, dark woodcut. Rey recognised the image instantly.

“The place you go in your dreams, that empty island? It’s a place that the force of the dyad creates so you can communicate with each other.”

Rey took a moment to process this.

“So… He is always there then?” Finn nodded.

“But creating something like that, it takes a stupid amount of energy,” he said. “And they don’t last forever. They simply can’t.”

“What do you mean, they can’t?”

Finn looked so, so tired in that moment.

“Rey. A single body can’t host two souls forever, let alone two force energies.”

“What happens if it does?”

He looked down at his hands.

“A dyad can’t exist without its other half,” he said quietly.

“Finn, _what happens?_”

“One of two things,” he said. “Either the physical form wastes away and the two souls are released into the force simultaneously,” there was a pause, “or one of the souls fades away, using its energy to seal up the loose threads of its connection, allowing the other to live.” Finn looked like he was going to cry.

“He’s killing you, Rey,” he said, and she violently shook her head.

“No, he’s not,” she said, as she suddenly understood.

_That must be what he’s trying to do,_ Rey thought to herself. _Even now, he’s trying to save my life, at the expense of his own._

And once again, she wouldn’t have a choice in the matter.

Rey’s throat was all at once too dry and too wet, and she felt as though all of the air in her lungs had turned to mustard gas; her hands were cold but the pounding in her head made her want to step into the freezing waters surrounding the ruined death star and never re-emerge.

She would have to live without him, completely.

“Thank you, Finn,” Rey said, her voice wobbling, but she kept her eyes on him. She offered him a watery smile and tried to rise.

“I think I understand now.” All she wanted was to go and lie down, and never get up again.

“Rey. I’m not finished,” Finn said, and his tone was tired but careful. She paused, watching Finn’s mouth work as he cycled through a variety of emotions. He finally met her eyes, a decision made.

“I think there might be a way around it.”

…

“Transferring life energy, as you know, is a skill that requires immense concentration.”

Rey nodded.

“Now, Ben has already demonstrated that it is possible to bring a person who is effectively dead back to life – ” Finn gave Rey a severe look at this point “- and, given his severely injured state, it’s just as likely that he gave too much of his energy completely by accident.”

“What’s your point,” Rey asked.

“My point is that what I’m about to suggest is incredibly dangerous, and may not even work. Ben has already demonstrated the _minor_ repercussions of force healing.”

“I don’t really have an option though, do I? I’m just as likely to die by doing nothing.” Finn nodded in agreement.

“That’s the only reason I’m even going to suggest this.” His fingers were tapping a nervous pattern onto the stone table.

“Rey, it may be possible to transfer Ben out of you and back into another body.”

Rey’s face contorted in confusion.

“But- Ben’s body is gone. I saw it.”

“I know,” Finn agreed, his eyes gleaming, “but I don’t think just any dead body would do. I think this whole ‘force’ thing has way too much to do with bloodlines for him, for_ it_ to work any other way. I think it needs to be his body, which is why it's never been written about before.”

“Finn, I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“I’m saying that even though this book doesn’t have a way of transferring Ben back to the physical plane written in it _specifically_, __it was also written ___long ___before cloning technology was developed.”

Rey was dumbfounded.

“You want to… Clone him?”

“His body, yes,” Finn said. “I think that’s the only way.”

"And then...?" 

"Then you'd send his life force into his new body, the same way you would send your own into someone injured."

"I'm not sure it's that simple," Rey said, but her mind was already turning the idea over, prodding it, testing it.

"As you said before," Finn replied. "This is the only option that has even a _slim_ chance of saving you both." 

“But – how would we even get hold of the right materials? The right technology?”

“The First Order still had the Empire’s legacy records about the old cloning depots,” Finn said. “They kept them heavily guarded, but they’re just as likely still there in the system. We could do it, Rey. We could get the equipment and we could make him a shiny new body, and get him out of yours.”

Rey couldn’t help the grin that grew on her face at every single use of ‘we’ that fell from Finn’s lips. It was exciting; it was earth shattering. It changed everything.

“Where the hell would be find his genetic material though?” Rey asked, and Finn frowned for a moment. The dawning look of mortification on his face was enough to stall some of Rey’s hope, which had been ballooning inside her chest.

“What is it?” She asked.

“After you left the base,” Finn said slowly. “A raiding party returned from Kef Bir. They had been picking up some of the other First Order defectors and done a quick survey of the death star ruins.”

Rey waited.

“They found his helmet,” Finn said. Rey's stomach lurched. “But you’ll have to tell Poe everything if you want to get to it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was a weird one to write, so let me know what you think! <3


	8. The words you left ringing in my Head

Rey spent most of the evening packing down the homestead. She was hoping it would only be a temporary departure, but if it turned out not to be, she wanted to make sure that her things would be safe from both the elements and from the inevitable curiosity of Tusken raiders.

Finn had been subdued for most of the evening. They had shared a meal, but it had been quiet, and though she knew he was packing his own things away in a rucksack it was clear that something was eating at him. Rey knew that the books could take quite a toll upon you during your first attempts at reading them; it was incredibly easy to slip down into the words and get too deep too quickly. She had sent herself into a fully-blown migraine once as a result of reading through the night, way past her own usual bedtime, and way deeper than her skill level should have really allowed. Rey’s body had punished her for it. Her companions at the rebel base had been convinced it was some kind of Sith attack upon their resident force-user, and she had to explain to them, wearily, from beneath the comforting press of three pillows, that it was not. They had left her with a bucket and drawn the partitions closed behind them so that she could rest, dismissing it as ‘mysterious Jedi ailments’. Rey didn’t have the energy at the time to correct them; she was not, after all, a Jedi in the traditional sense of the word. She carried too many attachments, too much darkness and a lifetime of suffering, to ever truly consider herself a master of the light. Yes, she fought every day to choose the light, even as she did now; but she didn’t always succeed. In that semi-lucid migraine state, she had almost come to the conclusion that it was _ healthier _ not to fight, but to simply allow the light and the dark to enact their own wills and find their own balance within her. However, every time she had broached the edges of this concept, the idea of losing her control, of giving it away _willingly_… It was too much of a risk to truly consider. Rey had spent so much of her life scrabbling tooth and claw to have her own independence, despite the many people, organisations and _forces_ that had sought to control her and direct her. To consider the idea of ceding that control to some internal cosmic system of existence? She simply couldn’t, even if she did believe that dealing in absolutes was a flawed and unnatural system. Ben had once said something similar to her long ago, before he had found his way out of the clutches of the Sith and before he had truly returned to being Ben. In the haze of her brain, Rey could feel his words and face swimming together with the idea, blurring their edges and tangling up in a web of confusion. The thought had stayed with her long after she had recovered from the migraine, but the battle against Palpatine had forced her to put it aside. When something so dark, so purely evil is able to exist in the world, the only way she could see to fight against it and overcome it was to match its force in opposition. And she had done that, in spectacular and catastrophic fashion, and the sheer volume of energy she had released from within herself was so intense and overwhelming that she hoped never to experience it again. It was only later that she had wondered at her actual ability; whether the sheer amount of light she had channeled was a result of her own power, or whether she had simply been the most convenient vessel through which the light side of the universe could direct its own will against the imbalanced energy that Palpatine represented. The longer she went without hearing the ancestral voices of the Jedi, as they had manifested at the time of the battle, the more she had come to believe that it was the latter. That wasn’t to say they weren’t there, of course. She had felt their presences now and then, but they were faint, and separate from herself like radio static, rather than brimming up from inside her, filling the shell of her body in an uncomfortable and electrifying way. She couldn’t help feeling that she preferred them at a distance.

Rey was brought back to herself all at once by the sound of a heavy bag being dropped on the floor. Her own thoughts had distracted her, and she chastised herself for it. Now was hardly the time to be considering the validity of the entire Jedi creed, let alone the limitations of her own powers. She looked up from the water tank hatch she had been securing, dusting off her knees as she creaked to her feet, seeing that Finn had entered the central atrium. It was his experiences with the books that had sent her down the philosophical spiral in the first place, and she found herself observing him a little more keenly as a result.

Though Finn’s eyes often drifted to the stack of shabby books, still sitting neat and unassuming upon the kitchen table, he didn’t approach them or do anything about them. As he moved back and forth throughout the atrium and his own private room, Rey had the distinct impression that he was treating the books with all of the wariness one treats a wild animal. They certainly bothered him, to say the least, what confused Rey more was that Finn didn’t seem to want to touch them at all. He was distracted, and almost looked… guilty? Surely not.

It would be something she could ask him later, she supposed. It was more likely that she was just unused to being around people for any period of time any more, and that her ability to read faces had become inaccurate.

Rey didn’t have time to dwell, regardless. She still had to remove the expensive and more functional parts of the vaporators, so they wouldn’t be stolen or “salvaged” by other opportunistic desert dwellers, as well as reassembling her own x-wing. Finn was already carrying various mechanisms up the circular staircase to start on the x-wing, cables and chunks of metal creaking and trailing behind him. She didn’t think they would be done until morning, but it didn’t matter that they would be working through the night, at least not to her. They would leave for the rebel base the moment her ship was able to take flight.

Rey didn’t have the brain space for sleep, even if she was to attempt it.

Not when there was a chance at bring back something she had lost, and certainly not when there was a ticking clock on it.

…

It was a shame to have to undo all of the good work BB-8 and herself had done on the vaporators literally that morning, but the work was far quicker when pulling each system apart than it was when putting them back together. The air was cool and the wind whipped past in freezing waves that felt as though they sliced through Rey’s very skin. She hadn’t noticed how thin she had grown, not in any definitive way at least. It was only as the cold seeped into her that she realized how wiry she was, how easily the breeze buffeted her about, and how sparse her meals had been over the last few months. The darkness was almost absolute around her and the little droid. Above, a thick band of stars shone down, bleak and cold, and the lights of the homestead felt small and distant in the vast void. BB-8 held a torch on Rey’s behalf and chirped away in astromech, though its tones were subdued. Total silence embraced the land around them as Rey moved between each of the vaporators. She was very aware of what could be moving out there in the sands and the darkness, and it leant a speed and a focus to her actions. She gathered the parts in an old blanket and hoisted it over her shoulder, the metallic pieces making a muffled clunking noise with every footfall as the two of them began the lonely walk back to the homestead. Rey had a thought, a feeling, and she paused. BB-8 stopped short as well, dipping slightly as the sand shifted under its weight. Its visual monitor bobbed and turned to face Rey in curiosity.

“Hey, BB-8?” Rey asked, and the droid beeped at her in acknowledgement. “Could you turn the light off for a moment?”

The request confused the little droid, but BB-8 did as asked. The darkness enveloped them, quiet and still. Rey stood in that darkness and breathed deeply and slowly. The silence, the cold, the emptiness of the landscape all around her felt so absolute in that moment, and she slowly tipped her head back to gaze upwards. Her eyes took in every star and planet, the constellations mapping untold stories far above her. Rey closed her eyes to this sight, beautiful as it was, and stretched out her senses. She was gentle with herself, and slow, and for the first time in a long time she didn’t feel a twinge of pain at the touch of the energies that moved around her. She felt a breeze that wasn’t quite a breeze stirring, tugging at her fingertips, her clothes, lifting her chin for her. It brought with it a sense of certainty.

“I’m coming for you,” she murmured. “Just wait for me.”

The droid said nothing, and they eventually made their way back in the darkness.

…

“Are you ready?” Rey said over the comms, her voice crackling with a slight delay in her own ears.

“As I’ll ever be,” Finn replied. Rey could tell he was stifling a yawn, and she tried not to feel too smug about it. She hadn’t gained _that_ particular skill through any kind of healthy or positive practice, but it was going to serve her well, at least for a while longer.

“Don’t fall asleep on me now,” she joked, and started flipping dials and switches in preparation for take-off. The ship thrummed obediently to life beneath her touch, and Rey was proud of their handiwork. They had been replacing the final pieces as the sun bled across the horizon, just as Rey had predicted, and the day had reached searing temperatures in a matter of minutes. Finn had practically sprinted to the Millennium Falcon to get out of the heat, eyes narrowed to the glare of the twin suns.

“I’m sending you the coordinates for each jump,” Finn said. “There’s a certain approach to the base that’s considered ‘the right one’ now and ground forces have orders to shoot down anything that doesn’t comply.”

“What happened to just giving your identification code?” Rey asked. Her input screen blinking green with a notification let her know that the data had been received. It automatically loaded the details of the trip.

“It’s an added measure. With so many ex-first order ships coming in to land now, it would be far easier for a non-rebel ship to slip through the cracks or get hold of a code. They could do a lot of damage if they did.”

“That’s fair, I suppose.”

Their ships broke the atmosphere, and Rey blinked down as the curvature of the planet became more and more apparent. The red light of sunrise was dispelled entirely by the emptiness of space, and the internal cabin lights flickered on. All was quiet in the cockpit. Rey watched the entire planet shrink below her. She hadn’t looked back, or down at the homestead as they had commenced take-off. Part of her thought that looking back would be too much of a goodbye. She had every intention of returning to Tatooine, especially if things were to go wrong and the worst was to pass.

“You ok, Rey? We’re going to enter the first jump soon.”

“Yeah,” she said, and snapped her eyes forward again. The cold of space was already seeping into the small bubble of safety where Rey sat, and she was grateful as the heaters kicked in.

“Preparing for jump,” Finn said, and Rey began moving through her own lightspeed protocols.

“In three, two, one…”

The stars bled into thin white stripes across the sky, and she was rocketing towards an unknown fate once more.

…

The dropped out of light speed above the atmosphere of the lush rainforested planet. From above, the entire surface appeared to a hazy green-grey colour, with thick bands of rivers winding their way across the surface in place of oceans. As they slid into orbit of the planet their radios exploded with a confused cacophony of chatter, and Rey had to rapidly try and retune to the relevant channel and clear out the extra feedback.

“You have entered the airspace of the liberated rebel alliance,” the deep voice on the other end of the radio intoned. “State your identification and business.” 

“This is AA-589,” Rey called, feeling a small jolt as always at carrying the same call number as Luke Skywalker.

“ And this is the Millennium Falcon,” came Finn’s own response, and he rattled off his identification code.

“Requesting permission to approach for landing.”

The radio went dead for a moment, and there was a scrambled clattering noise like someone picking up an old fashioned telephone.

“Finn?” came a much higher voice, a woman’s voice.

“Hey, Rose,” The reply from Finn was distinctly sheepish. A harsh, high pitched noise filled the radio headset, and Rey winced and tried quickly to lower the volume.

“Oh thank _God_,” Rose yelled, and Rey realized the horrific feedback noise must have come from Rose’s own mouth. Rey followed Finn down to the surface of the planet, and hailed Finn on a private channel as a steady litany of angry-relieved chatter swamped the radio channel.

“You didn’t tell them where you were, did you,” Rey asked Finn. She could practically hear him gulp.

“It… May have slipped my mind.” Rey rolled her eyes.

“If he kills you, I am going to let him,” she said matter-of-factly, and turned off the channel as he started to splutter his own indignant retorts.

They touched down close by to each other, the branches of the surrounding canopy tight around them on each side and bending violently in the force of their engines. Rey realized, with a pang, that it was the same small clearing she had landed in on the day they had triumphed over the first and final orders. There was a small crowd building around each of the ships as Rey went through the shut down protocols, and she was finishing up right about the time the loading ramp lowered from the Falcon. She popped the cockpit open and climbed out easily enough, dropping lightly to the floor, and was momentarily overwhelmed by the amount of sensory input the forest hit her with. The noise on its own was incredible; she had forgotten in the sweeping emptiness of the desert just how loud and colorful and varied the sounds of the wildlife were, how constant the shifting of the leaves overhead. The smells, as well; the damp leaf litter underfoot was soft and each step released a heady perfume of its own, to say nothing of the heavy, pungent plumes of flowers that draped from long vines in the tree tops. Even the shifting of the light, through gold and brown and green, and the humidity of the air, was enough to throw her off for a moment.

She was so busy adjusting to her surroundings that she barely noticed the way the crowds parted around one figure. In fact, she didn’t realise that no one was talking until General Dameron emerged from the crowd that had encircled the ships, and Finn froze about a foot from the gang plank of the Falcon. Rey had never seen a grown man look so much like a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming speeder, but in that moment she could see Finn’s throat working and his eyes widening. Poe, meanwhile, had an intense set to his shoulders, and his eyes were dark with fury. Rey could see the muscles of his jaw clenching and unclenching, and she was grateful to not be on the receiving end of that look. She did, however, move closer to Finn as he approached. She may have threatened passivism, but if Poe ended up throwing blows it would be bad for himself, for Finn, and for the overall stability of the rebellion. Best to be close enough to stop anything explosive before it could start. He stopped a foot away from Finn. His agitation was clear from his head to his toes; he was bouncing on the balls of his feet, as though he couldn’t decide whether he should launch himself forward or run away. His head was shaking minutely and his eyes bore into the man in front of him. He was too close for an acquaintance, but not close enough to put Finn in a headlock in a single move, so Rey didn’t intervene. She was close enough, however, to hear Poe’s harshly whispered words when they finally came.

“Fifty four hours,” he said, his eyes narrowed and his mouth twisted. “Fifty four hours, and not so much as a flight plan.”

“I know,” Finn said, pursing his lips, but saying no more.

“We've been expecting a hostage call, a ransom demand, an _obituary_,” he hissed, and Finn lowered his eyes in shame.

“We’re meant to be _co-generals_,” Poe whispered, and it was so quiet that Rey could barely make out the words, but the hurt in his voice was clearer than anything. “ And you left me here to do this on my own.”

“Poe,” Rey said quietly, and she saw his jaw tighten at the use of his name. “He came to help me.”

“Yeah,” Poe said, bitterness in his voice. “That much is clear.” He turned and stalked away, back into the camp, and Rey shared a sympathetic look with Finn as the crowd dispersed. He was devastated, that much she could see, but it was clear that he wouldn’t stand for the injustice of Poe’s damnation. They would need to explain themselves, of course. But not just for the sake of a relic. Out of the rapidly disappearing crowd stepped Rose, whose wide eyes were full of puppy-dog pain, and she approached them slowly.

“Hey,” Finn managed, sharing a look with Rose before she was pulling him into a crushing hug. Rey knew it was crushing; she could here the gentle _whoof_ of Finn’s breath as the tiny mechanic squeezed him tighter than her arms should have been able to.

“Don’t do that again,” she grumbled, earning a mumbled an apology from Finn. She released him, and Rey braced herself in case Rose turned to deliver a hug to her. However, Rose simply put a respectful, warm hand on her shoulder and smiled as she said, “it’s good to have you back, Master Rey.” 

“I’m still far from a master,” Rey admitted, but she couldn’t help smiling right back.

“Sure you are,” Rose countered. “We all heard what you did for the Rebellion on Exogul.” Rey paled at the thought that she too might already have become somewhat of a myth, just like Luke. She wondered how much of the stories being told carried the truth, or whether they were simply that; stories.

“Come on,” Rose said with a sigh, oblivious to the loop she had thrown Rey into. “I’ll take you to Poe.”

“I’m not sure he’s going to want to see us,” Finn said, his tone a little hesitant. Rose blew a dismissive raspberry in his direction and rolled her eyes.

“He’s been a mess without you,” Rose said. “Trust me, he wants to talk.”

Rey wasn’t sure if Finn felt more guilty with this admission in mind, or if it had tickled a little of his pride, but he followed behind her agreeably enough and so did she. They left their gear in the ships; they could unpack later if necessary.

…

They found Poe pacing in the Central Command, amidst the open air consoles and radio signalers. There were only one or two people sitting at their stations, head-phoned in and completely ignoring the general as he wore a path into the leaf litter. Rose took one look at him and turned on her heel.

“I’ll see you guys later,” she said, and she was gone before Poe had even noticed them. Rey had half a mind to follow suit with Rose, but Poe glanced up and the recognition in his eyes quickly turned to annoyance.

“I don’t want your explanations,” he said. “I’ve got things to do. For _some of us,_ the work doesn’t end with the fall of the bad guys.”

Rey looked to Finn, whose whole body was tensed as if for a real fight, and he gave her the tiniest of nods. She stepped forwards.

“You may not want an explanation,” she said, “but you deserve one.”

Poe stopped pacing, but only to stare at a star chart that was following the paths of several vessels through the outer rim; Rey realized that they were likely to be ships carrying ex-storm troopers back to their home worlds. Though his eyebrows maintained their tense line, Poe’s eyes weren’t really focusing on the map. Rey pushed on.

“When I debriefed with you both, before I left,” Rey paused to swallow. “I didn’t tell you everything that I should have.” Poe scoffed.

“No kidding,” He said, derisive. “It doesn’t take mind tricks to know you were holding back.” Rey felt the sting of those words, but she did her best to take them in stride.

“I didn’t have the words to explain,” she said simply, and she could feel him roll his eyes as he returned to pacing.

“But I do now.” Poe sighed, and stopped again. His head tipped back in resignation.

“Fine.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair and levelled Rey and Finn with a look.

“Say your piece, then tell me why you’re _actually_ here.”

…

So Rey told him her story. At the realization that a previous mortal enemy was still living inside of her, Poe had to sit down. Rey spared Finn the indignity of having someone else share his secrets, and told the simple white lie that she had sent out a distress message to Finn just before the sandstorm. She had felt the slightest ease of tension from his shoulders as the lie slipped effortlessly from her tongue. _ So much for being a Jedi,_ she thought to herself as it passed through the air. But it was in service of a friend, and Poe nodded along easily enough.

“Interesting, that your radio signal made it all the way out to Finn, but nothing made it back from Finn to me,” Poe had griped sarcastically, but his gaze had softened.

“So, what – you’re back to get medical treatment for your, your soul-dyad? To make sure you don’t die when _his_ side of this thing finally goes away?”

“Not quite,” Finn said eventually. Poe’s eyes immediately snapped to him; Finn hadn’t said a word as Rey had recounted her narrative.

“What do you mean, not quite?” Poe said. “If it’s as dire as you say-”

“Rey is just as likely to die regardless of medical monitoring.” Finn said firmly, cutting Poe off. Rey braced herself as the next words came.

“We want to bring him back.”

Rey was impressed with the sincerity of Finn’s voice. She was also impressed with the expression on Poe’s face.

“Like _hell_ you do,” he said. He looked between them for the punchline, his face paling even further as their expressions remained unmoving.

“You can’t be serious,” he breathed. “How would you even-”

“Cloning.” Finn answered quickly. Poe looked scandalized.

“No,” he said. “The cloning planets were abandoned decades ago-”

“But the technology still exists,” Finn said firmly. Poe looked ready to faint, or throw up. In that moment, he looked so tired, and so small. Nothing like the brash and bold pilot, the rebellion hero with a heart full of boundless hope.

“What am I missing here,” he asked. “Why would you want to- to bring back that monster?” He couldn’t stifle the shudder that travelled down his neck, and Rey was suddenly graced with the flash of a memory; a memory that wasn’t hers. There was first order paneling around the walls of a small, dimly lit room, and a dark figure with his hand extended over the face of a man in a restraining brace.

The man was screaming.

The man was Poe.

“Poe,” Rey started, but it was Finn who spoke over her.

“The man that was Kylo Ren is dead, and is staying dead,” Finn said. “That creature was a puppet of the Dark Side from childhood, enslaved by one dark master after another. The person that lives inside Rey isn’t Kylo Ren. It’s Ben Solo.”

Poe sneered at him.

“You and I both know that’s not how it works-”

“But it is,” Finn insisted. “Tell me that you would be the same person you are now, if you had been under the control of powerful, evil forces. Tell me you would be the same person you are now, if they had tried to scoop out everything that makes you who you are and stuffed something else inside, so that all you could do was watch, scared and alone, from some corner inside yourself.”

Rey wasn’t sure if he was talking about Ben any more, but the burning expression on his face made her grateful to depths she hadn’t felt before. She should have known that Finn would understand better than anyone else.

Poe couldn’t argue with him.

“Alright,” he said finally. “Alright.”

“What do you need.”


	9. From the Sky, From the Sky

It was taking Finn far longer to find the records than he had anticipated. Every step further back into the imperial legacy archives brought new layers of encryption, and despite Finn’s long involvement with the First Order it became harder and harder to find the correct passkey phrase. To make matters worse, there was a heavy layer of digital redactions laid across each document. Removing the redaction program’s firewall was taking even longer, and he muttered to himself as he and BB-8 worked together to run the numbers. Rey had spent the first twenty minutes or so hovering behind him, watching over his shoulder, and as his agitation with the system grew, he asked her to go and find something else to do.

“Oh,” Rey had said. “Of course. Sorry.”

This put Rey at a bit of a loss. With nothing assigned to her and nothing pressing to do, she wandered off to sit somewhere and simply watch the workings of the Rebellion. Perhaps someone would spot her as an idle person and enlist her to help with a menial task or other.

Rey had only ever experienced life in the rebellion under Leia’s careful guidance. Back then, the rebellion had moved with a chaotic kind of energy; there had always been fighter crews scrambling for patrols, pilots switching out with each other at breakneck speeds to maximise the usage of each of their scarce flight resources. During the height of the First Order’s hunt for them, there had barely ever been a combat-ready vehicle on the ground. The reasoning had been simple enough; those precious minutes of airtime had the ability to save lives, should an attack come. Those who weren’t piloting would be frantically running errands, delivering information and decoded signals, and monitoring planetary and gravitational scanners for First Order vessels throughout the nearest twelve or so systems; anything to maintain their lead should they have to evacuate yet again. The base operated very differently now. With the First Order crippled, the rebellion was in the uncharted tactical territory of having to give chase to the many splintered factions, many of which had turned to creating chaos for chaos’s sake. Rey’s feet had carried her of their own volition back to the clearing that served as an airfield. She didn’t want to move too far into the hustle and bustle of the space, as she was worried that she may actually get in the way. Instead, she found a tree with a comfortable looking bough along the edge of the clearing and she climbed it. The feeling of the cool bark of the tree against her skin as she pulled herself up, hand over hand, was soothing in the way it grounded her. In this act at least, she still knew what she was capable of. She swung herself into the little space where the branch met the trunk of the tree, and propped her elbow on one of her knees while the other leg dangled in the open air. From her vantage point, she could see almost the whole base, and oh, how it had changed. The central landing space had been cleared enough to allow double the number of ships to touch down, something that was happening at a steady pace in front of her. The landing area was crowded with a myriad of ships, all piling into any free space. She watched for several minutes, time stretching and warping a little as the second wind of her exhaustion started to fade. Many of the vessels were identifiably rebel ships, with the distinctive x-wing designs providing welcome points of familiarity amidst the chaos. Many of the other ships were repurposed merchant vessels kitted out with after-market defensive technology and weapons, and there were one or two custom models dotting the sea of machinery, all sleek lines and glittering paint jobs.

When the distinctive scream of a TIE fighter roared overhead, Rey just about lost her grip on the tree’s branches. She scrambled to get a good look at it, heart pounding. Its undeniable silhouette stood black against the powder blue sky. Rey was about to shout a warning to the crews below, when she realised. No one else was panicking. No one else was running in fear. And as she looked between the ground crews and the TIE fighter above, she realised that it wasn’t preparing to dive at them for a strafing run. It was, instead, circling lazily above, like a watchdog around a campfire. Rey watched as a small convoy of ships broke through the atmosphere and descended, the TIE fighter following them at a non-threatening distance. It felt odd to watch the fighter move in such a way; she had only ever seen them downed and burning, docked in silent in the holding bay of star destroyers, or scrambling in formation to deliver a painful and fiery death to anything in their way. Rey tentatively allowed herself to relax a little as each of the non-rebel ships approached. She watched them in curiosity, noticing blotchy white markings had been painted on each of the ships’ exteriors. An Upsilon-class vessel was settled in the middle of the convoy and it was clearly prioritised for landing, despite its significant size in comparison to the others. As it touched down, several members of one of the ground crews moved forward to assist the pilot with whatever cargo was inside. The ship settled onto the soft ground of the rainforest and the boarding ramp lowered with a hiss that Rey could hear from across the field. A little twitch from the force raised all of the hairs on Rey’s arms, almost like someone had prodded her with a fingertip and whispered _this is important, pay attention_. It was the first time she had felt such a thing since… Well.

Rey swung out of the tree, spinning and landing neatly on the ground. She didn’t acknowledge her intentions consciously; she didn’t need to. When the Force was dropping hints, it wasn’t her place to decide whether she should investigate it or not. Even if it was, her nature would hardly allow her to leave a stone unturned.

She wound her way through the various ships, eyes locked on the Upsilon vessel as much as was physically possible. She was just beyond the ground crew’s range of activity as the first of its cargo disembarked. Rey’s eyes widened at what she saw.

Descending the boarding ramp, one at a time, came a group of about thirty children. From her place at the edge of the scene, Rey would guess that they were aged anywhere between five and eleven, each dressed in a boxy grey tunic and matching grey leggings. Many of them had tracks of long-dried tears down their filth-smeared cheeks. The ground crews checked them over with monitors for disease or injury, then gathered them together in lines of two to walk further away from the camp. She watched as the adults offered kind words to the children, taking their scared little hands to lead them, and one or two of the smaller children were picked up in arms. They were walking towards a larger clearing Rey hadn’t noticed before; it was likely another addition that had been made in her absence. Though significantly further away, she could see that there were the peaked roofs of tents lining that distant clearing.

None of this quite mattered though, once she realised what had drawn her to the vessel in the first place. Her breath caught in her throat as she stared. There was one little boy, about three pairs of children from the end of the line, with dirty red hair that had appeared to be singed on one side of his head.

She could feel the force moving within him, like a candle guttering in an open window. Small, but distinct; a tiny beacon for her to find.

“Hey!” Rey called out. The ground crew who were leading the children stopped and looked around. When they spotted her, they straightened up in recognition.

“Master Rey!” One of them replied, a young woman with a kind face. “We’re so glad you’re back!”

“As am I,” Rey replied, though she didn’t know if she meant it until the words were out of her mouth. She was a little bit relieved to realise that yes, she did in fact mean it, and she couldn’t help the quirk of a smile that crossed her lips.

“Was there something we could help you with?” the woman asked. Her tone was polite but she was clearly worrying about holding up the children in a dangerous work area for too long.

“Yes there is, but-” Rey paused for a moment, “- I can ask while we get these children off the landing field.”

The woman smiled, relief allowing her shoulders to relax, and she nodded her head to Rey to walk beside her. She fell in step with the woman easily enough, and the little group was able to begin walking again.

“These children… Where are they from?” Rey was pretty certain she already knew the answer, but she wanted to hear it herself.

“The short answer is, we don’t know yet,” the woman shrugged. She didn’t seem concerned by this. “But, once we get their identification numbers from them, Finn’s team will hopefully be able to pull that data for us and we can begin to organise them transportation home.” She met Rey’s eyes. “To their _real_ homes.”

Rey nodded.

“How long have they been…?”

“With the First Order?” Rey’s companion finished her question for her. Her eyes dropped away, her face darkening. “It’s hard to say. These ones were pulled from a training facility that was particularly resistant to the negotiation team’s attempts at… peaceful communication.” She swallowed, clearly pushing down some of the stories she had heard. She nodded, as though reassuring herself. “They’ve been through a lot. More than most, even.”

Rey’s heart ached for the children walking beside her, silent and owlish in the bright sunlight. They were approaching the next clearing, the one that Rey had only seen from a distance. Though smaller than the primary airfield, this clearing was teaming with life. It had been set up, Rey realised, as a refugee camp of sorts. The long banks of tents were open-air, set up primarily to keep off the rain rather than the cold in the planet’s climate, and they formed rings around the central space of the clearing, which doubled as a smaller landing area. Inside each were long rows of bunks and open shelving, which was in turn filled with old rucksacks and random assortments of items. Rey realised, in a moment of familiarity, that the items in each of those shelves likely represented the sum total of an individual’s possessions.

Rey could see Rebellion workers milling about. Some of them were talking to the tent dwellers, taking down their details on portable data pads before moving to the next one; others were helping to allocate beds and distribute resources. As they approached, a small team of rebellion officers armed with data pads broke off from one of the tents.

”These are the survivors of training facility M-87,” one of the other ground crew called out to the approaching data pad team. “The first of several.”

There were nods, and the team started taking the children in pairs to sit in the sunshine and talk. Rey had to act quickly.

“There’s a little boy here that I have to speak to. It’s important.” she told her companion. “May I?” Though the woman looked confused, she nodded.

“Of course.” Rey placed a brief hand on her shoulder and smiled, before turning to look for the boy. He was waiting with his little partner, but the data loggers were already busy with other children. She approached him, and knelt down so that he would not feel intimidated. He was wiry, and though Rey had not been around children very often in her life she would have hazarded that he was eight or nine. He didn’t want to meet her eye, and shrunk away from her as she began to speak.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Rey.”

The little boy said nothing, but he put himself a little further in front of the child he was partnered with. It was an act of protectiveness that Rey almost would have missed if she wasn’t well-versed in those behaviours herself. It made her heart break to see a child so young, forced to act this way by their circumstances. She wondered how they had been treated at this facility they were at, and had to push her mind away from the topic. Now was not the time to deal with the rage she felt at the indignity and suffering these poor children had been put through, but rather it was a time to offer them a chance of healing and shelter. She kept her hands relaxed and draped her arms across her knees, attempting to emanate a degree of tranquillity from within. She smiled, her face gentle.

“Who is your friend?” She asked, peering with a smile past his little shoulder.

“She doesn’t want to talk to you,” the boy said, and Rey had the image of a cornered animal appear in her mind, fully formed.

“And that’s alright,” she said slowly. “She doesn’t have to. Will _you_ speak to me, though?” For the first time, his eyes met hers, flashing green and bubbling with fear and anger. She maintained eye contact, staying as steady and calm as possible, despite the building excitement she could feel within. He tilted his head forward, once, and it was enough for Rey.

“Do you have a name, little one?” She asked.

“I’m BN-1138.”

Something in Rey’s chest fluttered.

“It’s a good name,” she said, “if perhaps a little long.”

The boy looked down at his feet.

“The soldiers told me it wasn’t my real name,” he said quietly. Rey paused before she answered him.

“It is a name,” she reasoned. “It’s not the one your parents gave you though. That’s what we’re doing here,” she looked around at the people that surrounded them, and the little boy looked around too. “We’re finding out about your real names and your families, and we’re going to return you to them. They have probably been very scared for you, as you’ve been away for a long time.”

His little face scrunched up at this.

“But what if I don’t like the name my parents gave me?” he asked.

“Do you like the name you have right now?” she asked. He frowned and shook his head no. Rey thought about it.

“Hm. Well, I suppose you could always choose your own name,” she reasoned. “I certainly did, and so did Finn.” At the mention of Finn, the little boy’s face lit up.

“You know Finn? _The_ Finn?” he asked. It startled a laugh out of her.

“Well, yes I do. He’s one of my best friends. His name used to be FN-2187.” She paused, thinking.

“Do you want me to help you choose a new name, all of your own?” His eyes widened.

“Yes please.” The little girl was peeking out from behind him.

“Well let’s see,” she said, thinking it over. “Finn chose his name from his old letters, FN, and since you’re just as brave as Finn is-” the little boy nodded eagerly – “I suppose your name would be…” she froze, her throat tightening.

“It would be Ben, wouldn’t it?” The boy looked puzzled. She could see him thinking it over, his eyes looking away and his little head nodding of its own accord.

“Ben…” he said, in almost a murmur. “I’m Ben, then.”

Rey fought against the watery smile that threatened to overcome her entire face. She leaned in a little bit as the boy rolled the name around inside his head a little more, mouthing it to himself as he did so.

“Hey, Ben?” Rey asked quietly. The boy took a moment, but he answered her.

“Yes?”

“Does anyone in the First Order know how special you are? Do they know about your powers?”

His entire face paled in the space of a second, smile vanishing.

“How did you-”

“It’s alright,” she said. “I’m special too.”

The boy took a deep breath, and sized her up.

“I don’t know what it is.” he said eventually.

“Why don’t you tell me what it is that you can do,” Rey suggested.

“Sometimes I can… Move things.”

“Like this?” Rey asked, and she dug around in the leaf litter for a moment before pulling up a couple of pebbles. With a little bit of concentration, she got them to bob around, a few inches above the palm of her hand. Ben’s eyes just about rolled out of his head, they were so wide. He nodded vigorously.

“Not quite like that, but sometimes!” he said.

_I knew it,_ Rey thought. One of the data pad operators approached Rey’s little duo, and hesitated when they saw Rey. Her time was up.

“You have to go now, Ben,” Rey said, “but I want you to know that you’re not alone, alright? If you ever want to learn about your powers, you’ll be able to find me through the Rebellion.” She slowly stood up, and the worker approached with a smile. They were most of the way to a tent when Ben turned around.

“What’s it called?” he yelled across the open field. “The – your powers?”

Rey smiled.

“It’s the Force,” she called back.

…

She hadn’t expected R2-D2 to be wandering about amidst the landing field, but she was pleased to see a familiar figure nonetheless.

“Well hello, you,” she said to him, and he chittered with excitement and surprise. Clearly information about her arrival travelled more slowly through the ranks of Astromechs than it did through the ranks of organic beings; something about that pleased Rey. He asked her a question in astromech.

“Why, no, I don’t really have anything to do,” she replied. “I’ve just been with some of the children who came from one of the First Order’s training bases. Finn’s busy trying to find out something important for me.” She smiled down at the droid as they picked their way across the base.

“You don’t happen to know where we could find cloning facilities, do you?”

His reply made her face drop.

“No,” she breathed. “Are you sure?”

He chirped again.

“Come with me,” she said, and set off at a sprint.

She had to find Finn.

…

Finn was exactly where she had left him, hunched in front of a data screen with BB-8, his fingers whirling across the keyboard.

“Finn!” She called, and he started. He scrubbed a hand over his face and looked around as though suddenly reminded of his surroundings.

“Rey,” he said, standing up. “I’m sorry, this is taking forever and all I’ve found is a file in a language I don’t know, listed as a manual for a machine I don’t recognise-”

“The cloning centres were on Kamino,” she said in a rush. She braced her hands on her knees, breathing heavily from the run. She cursed herself for allowing her fitness to slip so much, then quickly cast the thought aside. There were bigger matters at hand. Finn stared at her.

“How did you-”

R2 rattled up behind her.

“R2 told me,” she said, pointing a thumb over her shoulder at him.

“And it’s not just that. He’s been there. Fifty-something years ago.”

Finn gaped, and shook himself.

“We have to tell Poe.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for a lack of Ben (Solo), but I had to set up the next stage of the story. Let me know if you catch anything I've written that doesn't make sense, etc.


End file.
